A young Indian physicist was under pressure. His heart was set on working in the field of general relativity – the study of space, time, and gravity. But the director of his institute stood in the way. The physicist was told that he had to work on a field of the director’s choosing, or leave. He still kept at it, working on the mysteries of gravity in his spare time.
He ended up writing the most significant paper on general relativity to have come out of India.
This young physicist was Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri. The central result of his paper, published in 1955, is now known as the Raychaudhuri equation. It was important to the work of Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and others – work that revolutionised general relativity.
