Category Awards

Did Dr. Kalam receive the King Charles II Medal from the Royal Society?

Kalam is the second person in the world to receive the prestigious King Charles II Medal awarded by the Royal Society, which is an in dependent scientific academy in the U.K.

King Charles II Medal is a silver-gilt medal and was instituted in 1997. It is presented only to foreign heads of state who have notably contributed to scientific research in their country.

The first award was given to Emperor Akihito of Japan in 1998.

For Kalam, the award was an honour “to India and its people.”

Lord Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society of England, praised Kalam for leading India in its scientific and technological development. Kalam’s role was crucial in India’s transit into a developed nation.

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Which are the major awards received by Dr. Kalam?

Dr. Kalam was the recipient of numerous national and international awards. Their list is really lengthy. Let us briefly look at how his own mother country venerated him.

He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1981 and Padma Vibhushan in 1990. He also received India’s highest honour Bharat Ratna for his research and defence related work, and Outlook magazine ranked him as Second Greatest Indian in 2012.

Coming to his own state, Tamil Nadu, his death anniversary is observed as Youth Renaissance Day there. Further, the Abdul Kalam Award is given every year on the occasion of Independence Day from 2015 onwards. This carries a certificate, a gold medal and a whopping fifty thousand rupees.

On his 84th birth anniversary, October 15, 2015, a postage stamp in Dr. Kalam’s memory was released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at DRDO Bhawan in New Delhi.

After Dr. Kalam’s death, several educational and scientific institutions were renamed after him.

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WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF TONI MORRISON’S NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH?

Toni Morrison was an acclaimed author whose literary works animated the experiences of black women wit power, humanity, humour, and poetry. Her compelling narratives and fresh vivid language transformed the world of countless readers and writers. Let’s look back at this academician’s 1993 acceptance speech for the nobel prize in literature.

In 1993, acclaimed African-American writer Toni Morrison created history by becoming the first black recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She dedicated her life to crafting narratives that highlighted the experiences and realities of black women in America. The visionary force and poetic inputs that embellished her landmark speech on the occasion not only paid homage to her racial and cultural identity but also presented a critique of the use and misuse of language.

Fiction: educational or merely entertaining

Morisson began her speech by declaring that fiction is more than just entertainment. She expanded on her hypothesis by claiming that the oral traditions of storytelling bear evidence of the fact that narratives have always been a principal way we “acquire, hold and digest information”. Recalling how the most memorable sentence of one’s childhood is the phrase, ‘once upon a time she narrated a fable of the black blind clairvoyant woman and the dead bird to elaborate on how all the citizens of a nation are collectively responsible for creating an equal world that does not use language to discriminate, oppress or violate the minorities.

The vitality of language

She believed that the vitality of language lies in its attempt to describe what is actual, imagined and possible in the lives of its speakers, readers and writers. Referring back to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, she said ” language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it year for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable… unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction…Word-work is sublime…it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may the meaning of life. But we do be language. That may be the measure of our lives.” (excerpt from the speech)

Key takeaways from the speech

1. We acquire, hold and digest information via narrative.

2. It is our responsibility to wield language to create a more equal world.

3. Language is the measure of our lives

DID YOU KNOW?

1. Toni Morisson was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, but she changed it after she converted to catholicism.

2. Morisson was a college professor and an editor at Random House, before becoming a celebrated author.

3. Morisson was 39 years old when her debut novel The Bluest Eyes was published.

4. Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved won a Pulitzer Prize.

5. Morrison was honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama.

6. The novelist’s birthday February 18 is celebrated as Toni Morrison Day in her home-state Ohio.

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WHO WAS AWARDED THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR THE THEORY OF THE UNIFICATION OF WEAK AND ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERACTIONS?

Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics to be shared equally between Professor Sheldon L. Glashow, Harvard University, USA, Professor Abdus Salam, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy and Imperial College, Great Britain, and Professor Steven Weinberg, Harvard University, USA, for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alla the prediction of the weak neutral current.

Physics, like other sciences, aspires to find common causes for apparently unrelated natural or experimental observations. A classical example is the force of gravitation introduced by Newton to explain such disparate phenomena as the apple falling to the ground and the moon moving around the earth.

Another example occurred in the 19th century when it was realized, mainly through the work of Oersted in Denmark and Faraday in England, that electricity and magnetism are closely related, and are really different aspects of the electromagnetic force or interaction between charges. The final synthesis was presented in the

1860’s by Maxwell in England. His work predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves and interpreted light as an electromagnetic wave phenomenon.

The discovery of the radioactivity of certain heavy elements towards the end of last century, and the ensuing development of the physics of the atomic nucleus, led to the introduction of two new forces or interactions: the strong and the weak nuclear forces. Unlike gravitation and electromagnetism these forces act only at very short distances, of the order of nuclear diameters or less. While the strong interaction keeps protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, the weak interaction causes the so-called radioactive beta-decay. The typical process is the decay of the neutron: the neutron, with charge zero, is transformed into a positively charged proton, with the emission of a negatively charged electron and a neutral, massless particle, the neutrino.

Although the weak interaction is much weaker than both the strong and the electromagnetic interactions, it is of great importance in many connections. The actual strength of the weak interaction is also of significance. The energy of the sun, all-important for life on earth, is produced when hydrogen fuses or burns into helium in a chain of nuclear reactions occurring in the interior of the sun. The first reaction in this chain, the transformation of hydrogen into heavy hydrogen (deuterium), is caused by the weak force. Without this force solar energy production would not be possible. Again, had the weak force been much stronger, the life span of the sun would have been too short for life to have had time to evolve on any planet. The weak interaction finds practical application in the radioactive elements used in medicine and technology, which are in general beta-radioactive, and in the beta-decay of a carbon isotope into nitrogen, which is the basis for the carbon-14 method for dating of organic archaeological remains.

Credit : The Nobel prize

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WHO WAS PETER HIGGS?

Peter Higgs is a British physicist who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle, which was confirmed through the discovery at CERN, a European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2012. He and Belgian physicist François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.” The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.Higgs was born in England in 1929. He was taught at home as a child. Later, he attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol and was inspired by the work of the school alumnus Paul Dirac founder of the field of quantum mechanics. Peter Higgs graduated in Physics from King’s College London in 1950 and achieved a master’s degree in 1952. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1951 and performed his doctoral research in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins. He received his PhD degree in 1954 and became a lecturer in mathematical  physics at Edinburgh in 1960 and remained there till his retirement in 1996.

In 1956, Higgs began working in quantum field theory. In 1964, he proposed the theoretical existence of the Higgs Boson. Higgs developed the idea that particles – massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. Independently of one another, both Peter Higgs and the team of François Englert and Robert Brout proposed this mechanism. In 1964, Physical Review Letters, published Higg’s paper which predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs boson). In 2012, two experiments conducted at the CERN laboratory in Geneva confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle. Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

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