Professor E S Raja Gopal, INSA Emeritus Scientist, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Former Director, National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi visited Dibrugarh University from 18th August to 21st August 2016 as part of the INSA program for Popular Science Talks in Remote and Less Visited Places.
During the visit, on 18th August, Prof. Raja Gopal delivered a lecture on LEAP YEARS, LEAP CENTURIES and LEAP SECONDS: INTERESTING BUT LESS KNOWN FACTS in the Indira Miri Conference Hall of the University. Attended by an audience composed of teachers, research scholars and students of the various Departments of the University, in the lecture Prof. Raja Gopal has given a detailed account of the history of time keeping, the development of calendars as the civilizations have advanced, how the months and days were named and counted and so on. He enlightened the gathering by discussing the interesting aspects of Leap Seconds, related the phenomena to the slowing down of earth’s rotation and the challenges ahead for the scientist community with regard to the phenomena.
On 19th August, Prof. Raja Gopal spoke on Insecticides and Pesticides: From Boon to Bane, a largely attended lecture he referred to the urgent requirement of a potent insecticide to save the lives of people from malaria and also to augment food productivity for a growing world population by protecting the crops from pest attacks. Professor Raja Gopal narrated the invention of dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (DDT) as a pesticide by the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller in 1939 for which he was awarded Nobel Prize in Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948. He then drew the attention of the audience to the work of Rachel Carson on the effect of DDT in the aquatic ecosystem in a her book Silent Spring published in 1962. How this small book of Carson forced the world to change the perception about the application of insecticides and pesticides was very lucidly presented by Professor Raja Gopal. He referred to transiently stable insecticides, biopesticides and genetically modified crops (GM Crops) as possible alternatives to the damaging and harmful insecticides and pesticides. The lecture concluded with an exciting interaction with Professor Raja Gopal.