Homi J. Bhabha

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, FNI, FASc, FRS, Hon.FRSE (30 October 1909 – 24 January 1966) was an Indian nuclear physicist who is widely credited as the "father of the Indian nuclear programme".

He was the founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), as well as the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) which was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour.

TIFR and AEET served as the cornerstone of the Indian nuclear energy and weapons programme.

He was the first chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy.

By supporting space science projects which initially derived their funding from the AEC, he played an important role in the birth of the Indian space programme.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born on 30 October 1909 into a prominent wealthy Parsi family comprising Jehangir Hormusji Bhabha, a well-known lawyer, and Meherbai Framji Panday, granddaughter of Sir Dinshaw Maneckji Petit.

He was named Hormusji after his paternal grandfather, Hormusji Bhabha, who was Inspector-General of Education in Mysore.

He received his early studies at Mumbai's Cathedral and John Connon School.

Bhabha's upbringing instilled in him an appreciation for music, painting and gardening.

He often visited his maternal aunt Meherbai Tata, who owned a Western classical music collection which included the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert.

Together with his brother and his cousin, it was a ritual for him to listen to records from this collection over the gramophone.

Bhabha also received special violin and piano lessons.

His tutor in sketching and painting was the artist Jehangir Lalkala.

At seventeen, Bhabha's self-portrait won second place at the prestigious Bombay Art Society's exhibition.

Tending to a terrace garden of exotic plants and cross-bred bougainvillea and roses, Hormusji was an expert on trees, plants and flowers.

He kept books on gardening in the house's large private library.

Bhabha showed signs of precocity in the sciences.

As a child, he spent hours playing with Meccano sets, and was fond of building his own models rather than following the booklets that accompanied the sets.

By fifteen, he had studied general relativity.

Bhabha frequently visited the home of his uncle Dorabji Tata, chairman of the conglomerate Tata Group and then one of the wealthiest men in India.

There, he was privy to conversations Dorabji had with national leaders of the independence movement, like Mahatma Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, as well as business dealings in industries like steel, heavy chemicals and hydroelectric power which the Tata Group invested in.

John Cockcroft remarked that overhearing these conversations should have inspired Bhabha's career as a scientific organizer.

Though he passed his Senior Cambridge Examination with honours at the age of fifteen, he was too young to join any college abroad.

So, he enrolled in Elphinstone College.

He then attended the Royal Institute of Science in 1927, where he witnessed a public lecture by Arthur Compton, who would win the Nobel Prize in physics the next year for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect.

Bhabha later said that he first heard of cosmic rays, the subject of his future research, at this lecture.

The following year, he joined Gonville and 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 mills in Jamshedpur as a metallurgist.

Within a year of joining Cambridge University, Bhabha wrote to his father:"I seriously say to you that business or job as an engineer is not the thing for me. It is totally foreign to my nature and radically opposed to my temperament and opinions. Physics is my line. I know I shall do great things here. For, each man can do best and excel in only that thing of which he is passionately fond, in which he believes, as I do, that he has the ability to do it, that he is in fact born and destined to do it … I am burning with a desire to do physics. I will and must do it sometime. It is my only ambition. I have no desire to be a 'successful' man or the head of a big firm. There are intelligent people who like that and let them do it. … It is no use saying to Beethoven 'You must be a scientist for it is great thing' when he did not care two hoots for science; or to Socrates 'Be an engineer; it is work of intelligent man'.

It is not in the nature of things.

I therefore earnestly implore you to let me do physics."Sympathetic to his son's predicament, Bhabha's father agreed to finance his studies in mathematics provided that he obtain first class on his Mechanical Tripos. Bhabha sat the Mechanical Tripos in June 1930 and the Mathematics Tripos two years later, passing both with first-class honours.

Bhabha coxed for his college in boat races and designed the cover of his college magazine the Caian.

He also designed the sets for a student performance of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play Life is a Dream and Mozart's Idomeneo for the Cambridge Musical Society.

Encouraged by the English artist and art critic Roger Fry, who praised his sketches, Bhabha seriously considered becoming an artist.

However, exposure to work being done at the Cavendish Laboratory at the time motivated Bhabha to focus on theoretical physics.

When he registered as a research student in mathematics, he decided to change his name to Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the name he would keep for the rest of his life.

Bhabha worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while working towards his PhD degree in theoretical physics supervised by Ralph Fowler.

At the time, the laboratory was the centre of several breakthroughs in experimental physics.

He was awarded the Adams Prize (1942) and Padma Bhushan (1954), and nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 and 1953–1956.

He died in the crash of Air India Flight 101 in 1966, at the age of 56.