Homi Jehangir Bhabha

• 30^th October 2023 marks the 114th birth anniversary of Homi Jehangir Bhabha.

ABOUT H J BHABHA

• Homi Jehangir Bhabha, born on October 30, 1909, was a renowned nuclear physicist and a key figure in shaping India’s scientific future.
• He is popularly known as the father of India’s nuclear programme.
• As a student, Dr Bhabha worked with a Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and played a crucial role in the development of The Quantum Theory.
• While pursuing his PhD, Dr Bhabha contributed to major inventions in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.
• He explained relativistic exchange scattering, which is known as ‘Bhabha Scattering’.
• He made the theory of the production of electron and positron showers in cosmic rays, known as the ‘Bhabha-Heitler theory’.
• Additionally, he also predicted and forecasted the relativistic time dilation effects in the decaying of meson.
• After returning to India, Dr Bhabha established the Cosmic Ray Research Unit and also played a major role in the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.
• Following the same, in 1944 he started to research nuclear weapons and set up the Atomic Energy Commission.
• International
  • He served as president of the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 and also as the president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1960 to 1963.
• Awards
  • Dr Bhabha was honoured with the Adams Prize by the University of Cambridge in 1942.
  • He received the third highest civilian award Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 1954 and also the Fellow of the Royal Society by the Royal Society, London.