Where Did We Come From?

The following sections are included:

• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• Author's Foreword
• PHOTO BLOCK

I started my life in a conservative culture in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where to conform was the norm and to rebel a heinous sin. My career in science, however, took an opposite turn at an early stage, provoking rebellion even to the extent of ultimately acquiring the status of a maverick. I did not choose such a calling but this is the way my scientific career and research naturally led me. My mentor, friend and long-term collaborator Fred Hoyle always reminded me that if solutions to important problems in science were to be found within the realms of orthodoxy, they would already have been discovered. For the biggest unsolved problems, for example the origin of life or the origin of the universe, it would not be surprising to find solutions that lie in the realm of the heterodox…

My native country, Ceylon, as I first knew it, now Sri Lanka, was known earlier by various names — Serendip, Taporbane — amongst them. The island is believed to have been inhabited by various tribes from about 30,000 years ago, but my own ancestors, the Sinhalese, were said to be of more recent origin, having migrated from North India at around 500BC, more or less contemporaneously with the classical period of ancient Greece. Magnificent edifices, ruined cities and palaces that adorn the island dating back to the 3^rd century BC testify to a great civilization that existed at this time and a prosperous people trading with Greece, Persia, Arabia and China…

Through the hazy memories of childhood I can recall one occasion when, upon the warning of an imminent Japanese air raid, I was taken home in great haste from a Kindergarten classroom. This must have happened when I was about four years old and attending the Kindergarten at a neighbouring girls' school “St Paul's Milagiriya” which was just a short walk away from our house. I do not remember being overcome with any sense of fear or anxiety, but rather the thrill of creeping into the air raid shelter that was built just outside our house. As I mentioned in the last chapter such threats of air raids in Colombo came to nothing. The defences of the South-East Asia command in the region were a strong deterrent, and the nature of the terrain in the island was such as to prevent a Japanese invasion of the kind that happened in Singapore. The Japanese threat to Ceylon eventually receded over the following months until the time of their ultimate defeat in 1945…

The end of the long and hard-fought war against Nazi Germany brought in its wake a period of austerity and hardship for England. In 1946 London suffered from one of its worst recessions in many years, and there were acute shortages of foods and other essential commodities. Food rationing was in force, and there was a lot of visible poverty on the streets of London…

When I left Ceylon with my parents in 1946, the island was still a British Colony administered from Westminster. When I returned two years later it had been granted independence to become an independent Dominion of the British Commonwealth, still retaining the King of England, King George VI as its statutory head of state. Following independence, however, Ceylon was effectively free to govern itself through its locally elected legislature. A parliamentary system modelled on Westminster had an elected lower house, the Parliament, as well as a nominated upper house, the Senate. The first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon was D.S. Senanayake, and the first Governor General representing the King was Sir Henry Monk Mason Moore. The Dominion status of Ceylon continued until 1972 when it became the Socialist Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka, thereafter retaining only a nominal link as a member state of the British Commonwealth of Nations…

In September 1960 I found myself preparing to sail away from my native country for the second time in my life. But on this occasion I was facing the daunting prospect of venturing out into an unknown world, and into a foreign country all alone leaving my family and friends behind. The very thought made me homesick before I even started. I entered this new phase in my life with courage only because of the anticipation of intellectual reward in the end. This was a reward I dreamt of from a very early stage in my life — to follow in the footsteps of my father, and seek to understand the universe of stars and galaxies, studying astronomy at the best University in the world…

In 1961 historic events were taking place in space exploration, mainly on the Russian side. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to orbit the Earth aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. The long series of Venera probes to the planet Venus were launched, the results from which I would later use to infer the possible presence of microbial life in the Venusian atmosphere…

After returning from my visit with Fred Hoyle to the Lake District I spent most of the next year (1961–1962) grinding out the details of a revolutionary new model of interstellar dust. I discovered fatal flaws in the then fashionable theory that interstellar dust was comprised of ice grains. But a great deal of hard work was needed to convince our critics that this was so. This is typical of the way that scientific advances are made. A flash of insight or intuition may point the way to new possibilities but the hard slog of working out the details must follow before the final product can be delivered…

On every occasion when I have returned to Ceylon (Sri Lanka, now) after any lapse of time, I am overcome by a surge of emotion, recalling a period of my life that would always remain the happiest days of childhood. My first return from a chilly summer in Cambridge to sunshine and the warm embrace of family was particularly poignant, as I recalled thus…

As I have already mentioned, my assignments as a Professor at Vidyodaya University and later as a researcher at Caltech and Maryland were taken up during a year's leave of absence from my Fellowship at Jesus College. On my return to Cambridge I resumed my Fellowship but also took up an appointment as a Staff Member of the newly formed Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at the University. My fixed-term Research Fellowship was simultaneously converted to a normal Fellowship of the College, and I was also appointed as a Tutor and a College Supervisor in Mathematics. Each Tutor is assigned a small group of undergraduates to whom he is supposed to serve in a type of pastoral role, in loco parentis. Entertaining students once a term to sherry parties and being responsible for their general well being whilst at University was a new task for me and an experience I began to enjoy…

The date 22^nd May 1972 will go down as an important date in the annals of the history of Ceylon. My native country severs its last formal ties with Great Britain and declares itself a republic, with Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike as Prime Minister. From henceforth, reference in this book to this country ceases to be Ceylon, but Sri Lanka — which in Sanskrit means “the resplendent isle”…

In the year 1974 the 40-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope, a unique instrument of its kind at the time for observing the southern skies, was formally inaugurated by HRH Prince Charles. Fred Hoyle had played a major role in the realisation and completion of this project on the UK side. When UK funding for the project was in the balance it was Fred's powers of persuasion and personal intervention with the then Minister of Science, Margaret Thatcher, that eventually clinched the deal. A decade later, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Premadasa, was on a State Visit to the UK. Priya and I were fortunate to be invited as guests at a luncheon at No. 10 Downing Street hosted by Margaret Thatcher in honour of the visiting Prime Minister. I spoke at length to Mrs Thatcher on this occasion and our conversation naturally turned to Fred Hoyle and the AAT. Mrs Thatcher recounted a story later confirmed by Fred Hoyle. When it was her duty to defend the UK's share of the expenditure for the Telescope to the government she had to present a case, and she consulted Fred Hoyle for advice. Fred had told Mrs Thatcher to simply state this: “When a major TV programme on Astronomy is aired on the BBC it has the highest viewing figures.” To which Margaret Thatcher simply replied: “Say no more”, and of course the AAT was funded and came into existence. As we shall see later infrared observations carried out using the AAT by my brother Dayal and David Allen provided crucial evidence that supports the cosmic theory of life…

Serendip is an ancient name for the island of Sri Lanka and was in use from the 4^th Century AD. In the fairy-tale of Horace Walpole (1717–1797), “Three Princes of Serendip”, the heroes keep making delightful discoveries of things that they were not in quest of. This, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the origin of the English word serendipity…

The year 1977 marked several historic events. Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Silver Jubilee. Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. More relevant to my own story President Junius Jayewardene became Executive President of the Republic of Sri Lanka. In science the bacterium causing epidemics of Legionnaire's disease was finally isolated…

In 1979 Priya brings out her first book “Spicy and Delicious”, published by J. M. Dent, the same publisher who published the books Lifecloud, Diseases from Space and Evolution from Space. With this publication she launches into a career as a writer of cookery books and an exponent of Indian and Sri Lankan cuisine. She later goes on to take part in the TV series “Farmhouse Kitchens” and wins a national competition organised by the Independent newspaper in London to become Cordon Bleu Cook of the year in 1992. Her cookery writing continues through a series of books leading up to her authorship of “Leith's Book of Indian and Sri Lankan Cooking”, and her appointment as Visiting Lecturer and Demonstrator at the prestigious Leith's School of Food and Wine in London. So her aborted career in Law now takes an unlikely turn into the field of gastronomy…

The year 1981 marked the birth of our younger daughter Janaki. Two decades afterwards Janaki obtained a first class honours degree in Mathematics at Bath University — a third generation mathematician in the family — and then went on to do a PhD in astronomy at Cardiff under the supervision of Bill Napier. She enters my scientific scene at a later stage in this narrative, by collaborating on projects that led to an understanding of the processes by which genes of evolved life could be exchanged between planetary habitats throughout the galaxy…

With my elevated status in Sri Lanka as an advisor to the country's President and the Director of the Institute of Fundamental Studies, the years 1980–1981 were filled with a variety of social and semi-social engagements. One such engagement was as chief guest at the prize giving at St. Thomas College, a boys school that was the arch rival to my old school Royal College. These two schools, like Eton and Harrow vied with each other for supremacy in sport as well as in scholastic achievements. The annual Royal-Thomian Cricket match was the highlight in the country's sporting calendar. So speaking at my rival school's Prize day was a rather strange experience…

By 1983 Cardiff Astronomy was advancing rapidly in many different directions. There was a noteworthy development under Bernard Schutz on Relativistic Astrophysics that led eventually to a major group devoted to the search for gravitational waves — a prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity. In my particular areas of research, which were by now getting increasingly distant from the rest, there were several students, mostly from Iraq, working alongside me and Shirwan Al-Mufti on various aspects of the biological dust grain thesis…

There are moments in life one treasures above all else because of the knowledge that they would never return. In my own life's journey one such moment came in the summer of 1987, on the occasion of my parents' golden wedding anniversary. They were visiting the UK during the summer as they regularly did, and my brother Sunitha (then Professor of Heamatology at Imperial College) had arranged a celebration lunch at a hotel near Maidenhead. There were no speeches nor formalities, but together with my three brothers and their families, I savoured this rare moment of personal history with nostalgia and quiet reflection. Our happiest of childhood moments at 35 Hildon Place leapt out through the mists of time, and events in our two years at 23 Pattison Road, Hampstead, in 1947, flashed back with a vividness that seemed almost unreal. As we raised our glasses to our parents I wondered how many similar moments of our own family life, with Priya and our kids, would thus be remembered in years to come. We also reflected on the sobering thought that the many contributions to knowledge in various fields that had been made by the four brothers — Sunitha (medical science), Dayal (astronomy) and Kumar (nanophysics) — were in a sense a fulfilment of our father's own remarkable genius that was never given the opportunity to reach fruition…

On the journey of life one comes across an occasional traveller with whom a bond of kinship is immediately struck. One such individual Brig Klyce came into my life in the late 1980's with an offering of a 200 page thesis on which I was asked to comment and possibly help get published. In his manuscript he presented the case for our cosmic ancestry in as compelling a manner as it was possible to make at the time. The consonance with my own point of view, that I have described thus far, was so close that it was inevitable that we struck up a correspondence and eventually a working relationship and friendship that still continues…

Besides still vigorously pursuing my scientific goals, the first decade of the 21^st century heralded for me and Priya a new type of adventure. We spent a few weeks every year sailing to interesting and exotic places aboard cruise ships on which I would give lectures on astronomy and Priya sometimes gave demonstrations and talks on Indian and Sri Lankan cooking. After the voyages I had enjoyed in earlier years, these brief spells at sea were both a reminder of the past and as well as a welcome respite from the cares of a turbulent world…

The following section is included:

• EPILOGUE