Radiation Reaction in Electrodynamics and General Relativity

Abstract

It is a privilege and pleasure to be invited to contribute an article to the JVN Fest. When I received this invitation, I tried to go back along my world-line and look for intersections with Jayant. A popular article by Jayant Narlikar entitled ’The Arrow of Time’ [1] mystified and fascinated me. It roused an almost romantic longing and an urge to appreciate, if not investigate, such basic problems. Probably it was these subconscious fantasies that propelled me towards physics and eventually, general relativity. I still remember the first time I heard a public talk by Narlikar on Cosmology after his return to India. It was at the Homi Bhabha auditorium of TIFR in 1972. The hall was overflowing and I heard his (favorite?) joke on the mathematician, physicist and astronomer for the first time. I heard it again this year in his talk at the Academy and was impressed by his un-apologetic use of it to make his point! I met Jayant Narlikar at the Einstein centenary symposium in Ahmedabad in 1979 and his interests then included scale invariant cosmology (with Ajit Kembhavi) and black holes as tachyon detectors (with Sanjeev Dhurandhar). He carried his fame lightly, was unassuming and though he was not very talkative, he felt very approachable. When I finished my Ph.D. with Arvind Kumar at the Bombay University, I could not get a post doc at TIFR or work with Jayant, since he was away that particular year. Over the last sixteen years, I have had much overlap with Jayant in the organization of Relativity related activities in India. There is much to admire in Jayant and emulate. His time management, missionary zeal to the popularization of science, vision and hard work, pedagogic skills, fervor for the non-standard and ability to play devil’s advocate in his research almost as a point of faith. In addition to the above, personally, I also admire him for his ability to take criticism and his democratic mode of functioning.KeywordsBlack HoleGravitational WaveGravitational RadiationRadiation ReactionBinary PulsarThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.