Vinod Wadhawan

Dr. Vinod Wadhawan is a condensed-matter physicist and a materials scientist. He was associated with the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, for his entire scientific career. He served as 'Outstanding Scientist' and Head, Laser Materials Division, Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore, till 2004. After that he was a Raja Ramanna Fellow for about six years at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. He was also an Associate Editor of PHASE TRANSITIONS (Taylor & Francis) till...See more

Dr. Vinod Wadhawan is a condensed-matter physicist and a materials scientist. He was associated with the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, for his entire scientific career. He served as 'Outstanding Scientist' and Head, Laser Materials Division, Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore, till 2004. After that he was a Raja Ramanna Fellow for about six years at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. He was also an Associate Editor of PHASE TRANSITIONS (Taylor & Francis) till 2010, having done editorial work for this journal for 25 years. Wadhawan's current activities are centered around science popularization and book writing. His earlier books are: 'Introduction to Ferroic Materials' (Gordon & Breach, 2000), 'Smart Structures: Blurring the Distinction Between the Living and the Nonliving' (Oxford University Press, 2007), 'Complexity Science: Tackling the Difficult Questions We Ask about Ourselves and about Our Universe' (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010), and 'Latent, Manifest, and Broken Symmetry: A Bottom-up Approach to Symmetry, with Implications for Complex Networks' (self-published, 2011). He is an avid blogger, and his blog is aptly called 'The Vinod Wadhawan Blog: Celebrating the Spirit of Science and the Scientific Method'. He believes that scientists should take a lead in bringing more rationality and logic into public discourse. The scientific method is not something to be employed for doing science only; it has applicability in all walks of life. Wadhawan calls himself a scientific pantheist. [As described by Paul Harrison (2013), there are three main types of scientific pantheism: dualist pantheism ('spirit and matter are two completely different substances, and the soul is to some extent separate from the body and can survive the death of the body); physicalist pantheism ('there is only one fundamental substance, namely matter/energy, and mind is a property of matter'); and idealist pantheism ('the one basic substance is mind or consciousness, and matter is simply a creation or delusion of mind').] As he puts it: 'I am a physicalist scientific-pantheist. I am a part of Nature and Nature is a part of me, and everything wondrous and beautiful in Nature is available to me to admire, explore, and protect'. See less