Bv Sreekantan

Extensive air showers

Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays carry information about their sources and the intervening medium apart from providing a beam of particles for studying certain features of high energy interactions currently inaccessible at man-made accelerators. They can at present be studied only via the extensive air showers (EASs) they generate while passing through the Earths atmosphere, since their fluxes are too low for the experiments of limited capability flown in balloons and satellites. The EAS is generated by a series of interactions of the primary cosmic ray and its progeny with the atmospheric nuclei. The exponential nature of the atmosphere spreads the air showers laterally over several hundreds of meters, thus enabling ground-based arrays of relatively inexpensive detectors to record and study them. This book describes the EAS phenomenology, the detectors and techniques used, and the latest results on the energy spectrum and composition of the primaries of EASs and the results on high energy interactions obtained from EAS studies. It also describes the new TeV and PeV gamma ray astronomy (which has been developing over the past decade) and the newly emerging neutrino astronomy, which are related to the origin of cosmic rays. This book serves as an introduction as well as a reference for researchers in the field.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on consciousness and the self

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Consciousness, Agency and the Self.- Chapter 2: Conscious Agency and the Preconscious/Unconscious Self.- Chapter 3: Finding the Self and Losing the Ego in the State of Pure Consciousness.- Chapter 4: Converging on the Self: Western Philosophy, Eastern Meditation, Scientific Research.- Chapter 5: The Self as Organiser.- Chapter 6: Reconceptualizing the Separative Self. Chapter 7: Consciousness, Memory and Dreams in Kashyapa Samhita. Chapter 8: Experientially Acquired Knowledge of the Self in a Nonhuman Primate.- Chapter 9: Executive Functions as a Path to Understanding Nonhuman Con-sciousness: Looking under the Light.- Chapter 10: Self, Identity and Culture.- Part II: Self and First-person Phenomenology.- Chapter 11: Consciousness and First Person Phenomenology: First steps towards an Experiential Phenomenological Writing and Reading (EWR).- Chapter 12: Self and Neurophenomenology: Gift and Responsibility.- Chapter 13: The Inside-Outside Story of Consciousness: A Phenomenological Exploration.- Chapter 14: Self and Empathy.- Chapter 15: Adapted Self in the Context of Disability: An Ecological, Embodied Perspective.- Chapter 16: Self and Transformative Experiences: Three Indian Philosophers on Consciousness.- Part III: Boundaries of the Self and Origins of Consciousness.- Chapter 17: Soul, Neurons, Particles, or Mind-at-Large? Exploring the Boundaries of the Self.- Chapter 18: Is the Source of Awareness Present in the Quantum Vacuum?.- Chapter 19: Cosmological Considerations Relevant to the Origin of Consciousness.- Chapter 20: Reality and Consciousness: Is Quantum Biology the Future of Life Sciences?.- Chapter 21: Human Brain is a Coherent State of the Mind.- Chapter 22: Consciousness, Functional Geometry and Internal Representation.- Chapter 23: Consciousness, Libertarian Free Will and Quantum Randomness.

Homi Bhabha and cosmic ray research in India

Cosmic rays are very high energy particles arriving from the depths of space and incident on the earth’s atmosphere at all places and at all times. The energy of these particles extends over 12 decades from around 109 ev to 1021 ev and mercifully for the survival of life, the intensity falls by atleast 22 decades from about 100 particles/cm2/s to 1 particle/1000 km2 year. Cosmic ray research led to the discovery of many of the fundamental particles of nature in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s of this century and ushered in the era of ‘elementary particle physics’ at man-made accelerators. Even 86 years after the discovery, the sources of these particles and the mechanism of acceleration continue to remain a mystery.Homi Bhabha who became famous for his ‘cascade theory of the electron’ in the 30′s did pioneering theoretical and experimental research in this field during his post doctoral fellowship in Cambridge and later at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which he founded in 1945, became under his leadership, a major centre of cosmic ray research covering practically all aspects of the radiation and continues to be active in this field.

Developments of Space Astronomy in India

The universe is pouring out information on its extent, structure, composition, variety of objects, their relative motions, their temperatures, time variations, the electric and magnetic fields in the various regions, the physicochemical and biological evolutionary chains and a host of other details, in the form of a variety of particulate and electromagnetic, radiations, neutrino and perhaps exotic particles yet unidentified, and has left it to the ingenuity of man to record these radiations and come out with a consistent, meaningful understanding of the origin, the fundamental constituents and the forces behind the vast range of phenomena witnessed. In this endeavour naked eye astronomy was naturally the oldest dating back to several millennia, followed by telescopic observation starting with Galileo in the 16th century, spectroscopic observations of celestial objects planets and stars in the 19th century. The installation of the large telescopes at Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar in California were landmark events in the long history of optical astronomy. A vast amount of data has been collected and analysed and very many intricate aspects of the universe have been figured out on the basis of optical astronomy alone eventhough it is based on an extremely narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the 1930s, serendipitously a new window of astronomy opened up radio astronomy which has supplemented and complemented optical astronomy through the discovery of a vast range of phenomena not seen in optical astronomy. A flavour of the type of new results from radio astronomy window is available in the accompanying chapter by Prof. Swarup.