Homi Jehangir Bhabha, 1909-1966

Abstract

Bhabha’s death in an air crash on Mont Blanc on 24 January 1966, while he was on his way to Vienna for a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost to the world an outstanding scientist who was an imaginative administrator with a rich and many-sided personality and a great capacity for friendship. His scientific status in India was pre-eminent and for a decade or more before his death, his proposals on science and technology in India, especially for a large programme on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, were backed by the Government of India with unhesitating confidence. Scientists in India have felt a sense of loss so deep that nothing like it could happen again in a generation. The sense of loss was made even deeper by grief at the death thirteen days earlier, on 11 January 1966, of Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent, only a few hours after signing the historic Tashkent Declaration, bringing peace to the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. Many tributes from many countries have already been paid to Bhabha. They have come from people all over the world who were his friends and had worked with him in one or more of his wide fields of interests. He was a truly international figure of science and was known to everybody at the many international conferences which, somehow or other, he managed to attend without in any way neglecting his other multifarious duties and activities.