The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Of science and spirituality

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 29, 2006

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Of science and spirituality

Special Correspondent

Bangalore: "Code Name God", the book by Mani Bhaumik, released at the Landmark bookstore here on Friday, is unusual in many ways.

Dr. Bhaumik is the co-developer of LASIK eye surgery for correcting vision defects and is among the leading medical experts and researchers in the United States. His book seeks to explore the connection between science and spirituality.

He goes back to his childhood in rural Bengal and the difficulties faced by his family from the British police because his father was a nationalist involved in the struggle for freedom. A few years later, Dr. Bhaumik had the opportunity to spend a few days with Mahatma Gandhi at his camp. A scholarship enables the rural boy, strong in science and mathematics, to enter a college in Kolkata.

Dr. Bhaumik's college principal presented him a book of letters of Swami Vivekananda, an old student of the institution. "The philosophy of `we are part of god' was in conflict with the Christian theory of `original sin' and the missionaries failed as unifiers," he says.

His postgraduate studies brought him in touch with Satyendra Nath Bose, already famous for his role in formulating the Bose-Einstein theory of statistics.

In 1954, Dr. Bhamuik got a scholarship to study at the new Indian Institute of Technology and came into contact with a number of visiting scientists from the West; a post doctoral fellowship enabled him go to the U.S. and join the University of California, Los Angeles, for a research programme. As he writes disarmingly, "I arrived in Los Angeles with three dollars in my pocket." Within a year he was looking into advanced laser technology, then a new science.

What he discovered and developed as a scientist and as a person inclined to introspection and philosophy are not that different from each other as one of the last chapters `When Science Meets Religion' explains.

Cosmology and the questions about how the universe came into being naturally turn even a scientist to seek the answer that religion in its truest sense attempts to provide.

In the book, Dr. Bhaumik emerges as a scientist who believes in god.

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