Cause And Effect

A band of scientists from all over the country, calling themselves the Breakthrough Science Society, and led by Professor Soumitro Banerjee, are fighting for their right to proof in a post-fact world.

- Sandip Roy

Acharya Sir Prafulla Chandra Ray, born in 1861, is a legend in Indian science: a chemist, an educator, an entrepreneur and the founder of Bengal Chemicals, India’s first pharmaceutical company. But to Soumitro Banerjee, a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kalyani (a couple of hours outside Kolkata), he’s a hero not just for those achievements.

“In chemistry class, Ray would bring in a piece of bone picked off the street, heat it on the Bunsen burner, and when it got powdery he would put it in his mouth,” Banerjee chuckles, recounting his favourite anecdote about the scientist whose life he has studied and documented. “His students would be aghast. But Ray would calmly explain that, by that point, it was nothing but calcium oxide and calcium carbonate. He was trying to give them a scientific bent of mind.”

As the general secretary of the Breakthrough Science Society, Banerjee is passionate about this “scientific bent of mind”. Science is not just subjects – physics, chemistry, mathematics. “It is a way of thinking. It tells us not to believe anything without proof.”

He worries that in India, pseudo-science is on the rise. Television channels peddle supernatural incidents as fact. WhatsApp forwards tout “scientific” proof of substances that “purify” blood and eliminate “negative energy”. Politicians claim that the flying chariots in Indian mythology actually existed.