My congratulations to Dr Ashoke Sen

Dr Sen himself

If you are an Indian then this is the proudest that you are ever going to feel. Yes, there will be glories achieved in fields that you expect like cricket Hollywood etc. but what Dr Ashoke Sen has done will always make those look pale.

In case you are not aware last week Dr Sen was one of the nine people who won the Yuri Milner first fundamental Physics prize. The award carries with itself prize money of $ 3 million and is the most lucrative awards in the world, almost three times the amount as the Nobel Prize. The award was started by Yuri Milner a Russian student of physics who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later made a fortune as an investor.

Yuri Milner  - The Man Behind the award

The field of Physics for which Dr Sen has been awarded is called the string theory. Here is what Dr Sen said about his work “A string theory is an attempt to unify quantum theory and gravity and certainly the research is not finished yet. A lot of work is still going on, so my work in this was on a specific aspect of string theory which is called dualities and that turned out to be an important aspect of string theory. As of today, we cannot see any practical application. But, it is mainly to understand what are the basic constituents of nature, what are the fundamental laws that drive everything we see around us,"

For a mortal like me it’s a bit tough to understand what it all means but I am sure that the work has important consequences and will lead to important discoveries in future.  Although Dr Sen admits that there is still plenty of work that needs to be done it’s a great start for all of us. I also want to be one of many to congratulate the man on his achievements and this I am sure is one of many that we can expect. You sir, are a credit to yourself to the whole nation and you will provide inspiration to many up and coming scientists who can carry forward your work.

In the end just some more information about Dr Sen, he is a Theoretical physicist at Allahabad’s Harish Chandra Research Institute, he studied at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur and got a doctorate from State University of New York, Stonybrook. 

It is one impressive CV that Dr Sen has and I sincerely hope that it becomes even more impressive as time and research takes its course.

You may want to send your congratulations to him here.