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    Bhabha

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    Palak Pathak
    Homi Bhabha was born in 1909 to a wealthy Parsi family in India. He studied at Cambridge University, where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics. During his studies, he published influential papers on cosmic ray absorption and electron-positron scattering. After returning to India, Bhabha convinced political leaders like Nehru to establish a nuclear program. He founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission, serving as the first chairman and directing India's nuclear development program. Bhabha advocated intensely for India to develop nuclear weapons.

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    Bhabha

    Uploaded by

    Palak Pathak
    35 views2 pages
    Homi Bhabha was born in 1909 to a wealthy Parsi family in India. He studied at Cambridge University, where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics. During his studies, he published influential papers on cosmic ray absorption and electron-positron scattering. After returning to India, Bhabha convinced political leaders like Nehru to establish a nuclear program. He founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission, serving as the first chairman and directing India's nuclear development program. Bhabha advocated intensely for India to develop nuclear weapons.

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    Homi Bhabha was born in 1909 to a wealthy Parsi family in India. He studied at Cambridge University, where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics. During his studies, he published influential papers on cosmic ray absorption and electron-positron scattering. After returning to India, Bhabha convinced political leaders like Nehru to establish a nuclear program. He founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission, serving as the first chairman and directing India's nuclear development program. Bhabha advocated intensely for India to develop nuclear weapons.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    35 views2 pages

    Bhabha

    Uploaded by

    Palak Pathak
    Homi Bhabha was born in 1909 to a wealthy Parsi family in India. He studied at Cambridge University, where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics. During his studies, he published influential papers on cosmic ray absorption and electron-positron scattering. After returning to India, Bhabha convinced political leaders like Nehru to establish a nuclear program. He founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission, serving as the first chairman and directing India's nuclear development program. Bhabha advocated intensely for India to develop nuclear weapons.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    Early life and education[edit]

    Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born into a prominent wealthy Parsi family, through which he was
    [5]
    related to businessmen Dinshaw Maneckji Petit. He was born on 30 October 1909. His
    father was Jehangir Hormusji Bhabha, a well known Parsi lawyer and his mother was
    [6]
    Meheren. He received his early studies at Bombay's Cathedral and John Connon School
    and entered Elphinstone College at age 15 after passing his Senior Cambridge Examination
    with Honours.
    He then attended the Royal Institute of Science in 1927 before joining Caius College of
    Cambridge University. This was due to the insistence of his father and his uncle Dorabji, who
    planned for Bhabha to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering from Cambridge and then
    return to India, where he would join the Tata Steel or Tata Steel Mills in Jamshedpur as a
    metallurgist.

    Further studies[edit]
    Bhabha's father understood his son's predicament, and he along with his wife agreed to
    finance his studies in mathematics provided that he obtain first class on his Mechanical
    Sciences Tripos exam. Bhabha sat the Tripos exam in June 1930 and passed with first class
    honours. Meanwhile, he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while working towards his PhD
    degree in theoretical physics. At the time, the laboratory was the centre of a number of
    scientific breakthroughs. James Chadwick had discovered the neutron, John Cockcroft and
    Ernest Walton transmuted lithium with high-energy protons, and Patrick Blackett and
    Giuseppe Occhialini used cloud chambers to demonstrate the production of electron pairs
    and showers by gamma radiation. During the 1931–1932 academic year, Bhabha was awarded
    the Salomons Studentship in Engineering. In 1932, he obtained his first-class on his
    Mathematical Tripos and was awarded the Rouse Ball travelling studentship in mathematics.
    During this time, nuclear physics was attracting the greatest minds and it was one of the
    most significant emerging fields as compared to theoretical physics, the opposition towards
    theoretical physics attacked the field because it was lenient towards theories rather than
    proving natural phenomenon through experiments. Conducting experiments on particles
    which also released the enormous amounts of radiation, it was a lifelong passion of Bhabha,
    and his leading-edge research and experiments brought great laurels to Indian physicists
    who particularly switched their fields to the nuclear physics, one of the most notable being
    Piara Singh Gill.

    Work in nuclear physics[edit]


    In January 1933, Bhabha received his doctorate in nuclear physics after publishing his first
    scientific paper, "The Absorption of Cosmic radiation". In the paper, Bhabha offered an
    explanation of the absorption features and electron shower production in cosmic rays. The
    paper helped him win the Isaac Newton Studentship in 1934, which he held for the next three
    years. The following year, he completed his doctoral studies in theoretical physics under
    Ralph H. Fowler. During his studentship, he split his time working at Cambridge and with
    Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In 1935, Bhabha published a paper in the Proceedings of the
    Royal Society, Series A, in which he performed the first calculation to determine the cross
    section of electron-positron scattering. Electron-positron scattering was later named Bhabha
    scattering, in honour of his contributions in the field.
    In 1936, with Walter Heitler, he co-authored a paper, "The Passage of Fast Electrons and the
    [7]
    Theory of Cosmic Showers" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, in which
    they used their theory to describe how primary cosmic rays from outer space interact with
    the upper atmosphere to produce particles observed at the ground level. Bhabha and Heitler
    then made numerical estimates of the number of electrons in the cascade process at different
    altitudes for different electron initiation energies. The calculations agreed with the
    experimental observations of cosmic ray showers made by Bruno Rossi and Pierre Victor
    Auger a few years before. Bhabha later concluded that observations of the properties of such
    particles would lead to the straightforward experimental verification of Albert Einstein's
    theory of relativity. In 1937, Bhabha was awarded the Senior Studentship of the 1851
    exhibition, which helped him continue his work at Cambridge until the outbreak of World War
    II in 1939.

    Career[edit]
    Starting his nuclear physics career in Britain, Bhabha had returned to India for his annual
    vacation before the start of World War II in September 1939. War prompted him to remain in
    India and he accepted a post of reader in physics at the Indian Institute of Science in
    [8]
    Bengaluru, headed by Nobel laureate C.V. Raman. During this time, Bhabha played a key
    role in convincing the Congress Party's senior leaders, most notably Jawaharlal Nehru who
    later served as India's first Prime Minister, to start the ambitious nuclear programme. As part
    of this vision, Bhabha established the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the Institute, began to
    work on the theory of point particles movement, while independently conducting research on
    [3]
    nuclear weapons in 1944. In 1945, he established the Tata Institute of Fundamental
    Research in Bombay, and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, serving as its first
    [3]
    chairman. In 1948, Nehru led the appointment of Bhabha as the director of the nuclear
    [3]
    program and tasked Bhabha to develop the nuclear weapons soon after. In the 1950s,
    Bhabha represented India in IAEA conferences, and served as President of the United
    Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, Switzerland in 1955.
    During this time, he intensified his lobbying for the development of nuclear weapons. Soon
    after the Sino-Indo war, Bhabha aggressively and publicly began to call for the nuclear
    [8]
    weapons.
    Bhabha g

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