Homi Jehangir Bhabha

Indian nuclear physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha is widely regarded as the "father of the Indian nuclear programme". He established the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET), which was later renamed the BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Center) in his memory. He was also the founding director and a professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). The foundation of the Indian nuclear energy and weapons project was TIFR and AEET. He served as the Department of Atomic Energy's secretary and the first head of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. He was instrumental in the development of Indian space programme by aiding space research initiatives that were first funded by the AEC.

Homi Bhabha was born on October 30, 1909, into a well-known, rich Parsi family that included Meherbai Framji Panday, granddaughter of Sir Dinshaw Maneckji Petit and Jehangir Hormusji Bhabha, a well known lawyer. His paternal grandfather, Hormusji Bhabha, the Inspector-General of Education in Mysore, inspired the name Hormusji. He completed his early education at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai.
As a result of his upbringing, Bhabha developed an appreciation for art, music and gardening. His maternal aunt Meherbai Tata, was the owner of library of Western classical music that included compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert. Along with his brother and his cousin, he used to play recordings from this collection on the phonograph. On the other hand, Artist Jehangir Lalkala served as his mentor when it came to drawing and painting.

Despite having earned high honors in his Senior Cambridge Examination at the age of fifteen, he was too young to enroll in a college overseas. He thus applied to Elphinstone College. Then, in 1927, he went to the Royal Institute of Science, where he saw a public lecture given by Arthur Compton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Compton effect in 1923. Later, Bhabha said it was at this presentation when he first learned about cosmic rays, the topic of his subsequent study

He enrolled in Cambridge University's Gonville and Caius College the following year. This occurred as a result of his father's and uncle Dorabji's urging. They had intended for Bhabha to graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering from Cambridge before returning to India to work as a metallurgist at the Tata Steel plants in Jamshedpur.
Bhabha's father, who understood his son's plight, agreed to pay for his mathematical studies as long as he received a first-class grade on his Mechanical Tripos. In June 1930, Bhabha took the Mechanical Tripos, and two years later, the Mathematics Tripos. He passed both with first-class honors.
Bhabha created the cover of the Caian, the college magazine, and coxed boats for his school. For the Cambridge Musical Society, he also created the sets for a student production of the plays Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca and Idomeneo by Mozart. Bhabha was inspired by the English artist and critic Roger Fry, who commended his sketches, and contemplated pursuing painting in earnest. But Bhabha was inspired to concentrate on theoretical physics after learning about the work being done at the Cavendish Laboratory at the time. He made the decision to alter his name to Homi Jehangir Bhabha when he applied to be a research student in mathematics. He would use this name for rest of the life.

With his thesis, "On cosmic radiation and the creation and annihilation of positrons and electrons," Bhabha earned his PhD in nuclear physics in 1935. Bhabha initially determined the cross section of electron-positron scattering in 1935 work that was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. After him, electron-positron scattering was eventually given the name Bhabha scattering.

He and Walter Heitler, published a paper in 1937 titled "The passage of fast electrons and the theory of cosmic showers" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A. In this paper, they applied their theory to explain how primary cosmic rays from space interact with the upper atmosphere to produce particles that can be seen on Earth.

Before the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Bhabha had made his yearly trip back to India. He chose to stay in India due to the war and accepted a position as a reader in physics at the Nobel laureate, C.V.Raman led Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust provided funding for his experimental study of cosmic ray physics in 1940.
After being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, Bhabha won the Adams Prize, becoming the first Indian to do so. Bhabha was appointed President of the Physics section of the Indian sciences Congress and a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences not long after obtaining the Adams Prize. Bhabha was introduced by C.V.Raman as "the modern equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci" durin g the 1941 Annual Meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Bhabha publicly accepted his position as professor and unit head on January 20, 1942.

Bhabha suggested the founding of an institute for fundamental research in a 1943 letter to J.R.D. Tata. In April 1944, the trustees of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust made the decision to adopt Bhabha's suggestion and assume financial responsibility for founding the Institute. With funding from the Trust, he founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in June 1945. By October of the same year, TIFR had relocated to Bombay (now Mumbai) after initially operating out of the Cosmic Ray Unit of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Bhabha used the room where he was born as his office when TIFR first stated up, using 6000 square feet of the home where he was born.

"The development of atomic energy should be entrusted to a very small and high-powered body composed of say three people with executive power, and answerable directly to the Prime Minister without any intermediary link," wrote Homi Bhabha to India's first and then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whom he used to call as Bhai (Brother), in 1948. The Atomic Energy Commission may be used to refer to this entity for convenience. On August 10, 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was founded in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act. Bhabha was chosen by Nehru to lead the Commission as its first chairman. S.S.Bhatnagar and K.S.Krishnan were two of the three members of the Commission.
Bhabha suggested the government that a new laboratory be built specifically to create technologies for the atomic energy initiative after seeing that it could no longer be done at TIFR. At Trombay, 1200 acres (490 hectares) of land were purchased for this purpose from the Bombay government. So, in 1954, the Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay (AEET) began operations.

Bhabha is acknowledged for developing a plan that focuses on harnessing the nation's massive thorium deposits for energy production rather than its few uranium reserves. In November 1954, he delivered this proposal to the Conference on the Development of Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes in New Delhi. In 1958, the Indian government publicly adopted it as three-stage system. Bhabha served as the director of Indian Rare Earths Limited, a government-owned firm that was founded in 1952 to harvest rare earths and thorium from Kerala's monazite sands for the nuclear power programme. 

APSARA, the one-megawatt "swimming pool" research reactor was commissioned in August 1956, making India the first Asian nation with a nuclear reactor except Soviet Union. As opposed to past national research in atomic energy, which had been primarily theoretical, it permitted Indian nuclear experts to conduct tests. Because of his acquaintance with Sir John Cockroft, who had been his coworker at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, Bhabha was able to achieve advantageous conditions for India.

An agreement for the development of a heavy water-moderated, natural uranium-fueled National Research Experimental (NRX) reactor in Trombay was reached by India and Canada in that year. The sale was made possible because to Bhabha's personal acquaintance with WB Lewis, the then-director of the Canadia Atomic Energy Agency. On July 10, 1960, the reactor, known as the Canada India Reactor Utility Service (CIRUS), reached critically. It was India's first source of plutonium at the time had Asia's largest output reactor at 40 megawatts. The successful Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor design was likewise modelled after CIRUS. A heavy water facility in Nangal with an annual production of 14 metric tonnes was opened to provide CIRUS with heavy water. It started running on August 2nd, 1962.

Bhabha made the decision to construct a plutonium reprocessing facility in Trombay in July 1958. The Phoenix facility was built using the Purex (Plutonium-uranium extraction) method of removing plutonium from spent fuel. Construction started in 1961 and was finished in the middle of 1964. Phoenix generated India's first weapons-grade plutonium in 1964 when combined with CIRUS.
India hadn't truly generated nuclear energy despite the creation of APSARA, CIRUS, Phoenix, and the homegrown zero-energy critical reactor ZERLINA. General Electric was hired in 1962 to construct two light water-moderated nuclear reactor in Tarapur as a cure. The Tarapur Atomic Power Stations (TAPS) didn't fit into Bhabha's three-stage strategy since they were powered by enriched uranium. India benefited greatly from the Tarapur deal's conditions, which included a $80 million loan from the US at 0.75% interest. Additionally, Bhabha was able to negotiate the restriction of TAPS plant safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Bhabha said before the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Atomic Energy in December 1959 that India's nuclear energy research has advanced to the stage where it could produce nuclear weapons without outside assistance in response to worries about a potential Chinese nuclear weapons project. In 1960, Bhabha predicted that India would need "about a year" to create a nuclear bomb during a meeting with Nehru and Kenneth Nichols, who was in India on business for Westinghouse. 

Following the Chinese nuclear test on October 16, 1964, Bhabha started actively advocating for the creation of nuclear weapons. While stating at the Cairo Conference of Non-Aligned nations that India's nuclear establishment was "under firm orders not to make a single experiment, not to perfect a single device which is not needed for peaceful uses of atomic energy," Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru's successor, sought security guarantees from the existing nuclear powers. Bhabha stated that India could perform a nuclear test within a year and a half after making the choice to do so, but he did not "think such a decision will be taken" while he was in London on October 4. 1964, in anticipation of Chinese test.

On January 24, 1966 Bhabha perished in the crash of Air India Flight 101 near Mont Blanc. The official cause of the accident is a miscommunication between Geneva Airport and the pilot on the aircraft's position near the mountain. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been implicated in the alleged paralysis of India's nuclear programme, according to one the many hypothesis put up in relation to the plant disaster. In 2012, a diplomatic bag from India that contained calenders and a private note was found close to the accident site.

A 2013 book titled Conversations with the Crow was written by Gregory Douglas, a writer and conspiracy theorist who claimed to have spoken over the phone with former CIA agent Robert Crowley in 1933. Douglas cites Crowley's assertion that the CIA was behind the murders of Homi Bhabha and Prime Minister Shastri, who occurred thirteen days apart 1966, in order to obstruct India's nuclear effort. According to Crowley, a bomb in the cargo hold of the aircraft detonated midair, bringing the commercial Boeing 707 jetliner down in the Alps with little to no damage. He added : "We had the option of blowing it up above Vienna, but we thought the high mountains would be a much better place for the debris to land".

After determining a precise formula for the likelihood of positrons being scattered by electrons - a phenomenon now known as Bhabha scattering - he attained international fame. His work on Compton scattering, the R-process, and the development of nuclear physics were among his most significant achievements. He was a candidate for the Physics Nobel Prize in 1951 and from 1953 to 1956. In 1954, he received the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian decoration in India. He was chosen as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Gonville and Caius College in 1957. In 1958, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences selected him as a Foreign Honorary Fellow. From 1960 to 1963, he served as President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Patna (1944), Lucknow (1949), Banaras (1950), Agra (1952), Perth (1954), Prayagraj (1958), Cambridge (1959), London (1960), and Padova (1961) were among the cities where Bhabha was awarded honorary doctorates in Science.

A web series called Rocket Boys (2022) was inspired by the lives of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Vikram Sarabhai and Homi J. Bhabha. The second season was made available in 2023.