Prof. B.S. Murty’s address on the lineage of scientific belief, and Prof. Ashutosh Sharma’s audacious plenary that reframed carbon science as a civilisational — not merely technical — challenge.
Prof. B.S. Murty: On Perseverance, Quasi-Crystals, and the Gotra of Great Science
Prof. B.S. Murty, Director of IIT Hyderabad and the institution’s operational steward during the Carbon Lab’s most productive phase, opened Day Two with a reflection that was simultaneously personal and programmatic. His address ranged from the IIT Kharagpur of 1992 — where he arrived on December 6th, the day of the Babri Masjid demolition, and was forced to negotiate key access with a security officer before he could work past 5 pm — to the conceptual audacity of quasi-crystals, that once-forbidden discovery that earned Dan Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize after his 1984 paper was dismissed by no less than Linus Pauling with the sentence: ‘There are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists.’
“A life without purpose is no life at all. For us who are researchers, there has to be a purpose: is my research making an impact?”
The quasi-crystal anecdote was not incidental. Prof. Murty used it to make a specific, pointed argument to the assembled young researchers: that the history of science is a history of ideas that were ridiculed before they were recognised, and that the disposition which separates a researcher who merely publishes from one who changes a field is belief in one’s own anomalous result. He noted, with evident pain, that a paper from Benaras Hindu University had documented a five-fold symmetry in an aluminium alloy as early as 1978 — six years before Shechtman’s landmark paper — but that the students involved could not pursue it because their supervisor did not believe them. ‘In India,’ Murty observed, ‘if your guide does not believe you, you do not move forward to a large extent.’ A Nobel Prize, and India’s contribution to it, was lost. The lesson he drew was unambiguous: ‘Believe in yourself. That is something which is a quality of great researchers.’
He spoke of Prof. Chandra Shekhar Sharma’s journey with the evident admiration of someone who has watched it from close proximity, noting that the Carbon Lab’s achievement belongs to a particular lineage — what he called, in the Indian idiom, a gotra: the intellectual descent from Ashutosh Sharma through Chandra Shekhar Sharma, now propagating through the hundred-plus students whom Carbon Lab has trained. He closed with a prediction — that Sharma would one day be counted among the top three or four carbon researchers in the world — and a commitment to be present at the Golden Jubilee celebration, fifty years hence, ‘wherever I am.’
Prof. Ashutosh Sharma: Carbon, Consciousness, and the Heating of the Mind Inside
Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Padma Shri awardee, former DST Secretary, and the intellectual mentor from whose laboratory Prof. Chandra Shekhar Sharma emerged, delivered a plenary address that was, by any standard, the summit’s most intellectually wide-ranging and philosophically demanding hour. He began with a rhetorical trap: asking the audience how many believed the journey more important than the destination, then pointing out that everyone who raised their hand had, in his view, fallen for a socially comfortable answer rather than an honest one. ‘Actually, it is neither the journey nor the destination which is most important. It is the company.’ And then, with perfect timing: ‘It is the company paying for the journey.’
The laughter subsided into seriousness as Sharma turned to carbon’s dual identity — the element of life and the element of crisis. ‘Carbon is remarkable,’ he said. ‘From Nobel Prize — as for graphene — to power plant — as for coal — without changing its identity.’ He framed history through the lens of materials: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Steel Age, Silicon Age. What comes next? The Carbon Age — an age in which nanostructured carbons (graphene, carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, diamond-like coatings, carbon fibre composites) are not merely materials of the laboratory but the defining substances of civilisational infrastructure in energy, electronics, medicine, and environment.
“The top problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. The heating of the environment outside is a reflection of the heating of the mind inside.”
But Sharma was unwilling to leave the Carbon Age as a triumphalist narrative. He introduced what he called the ‘holy grails’ of carbon science: the conversion of CO₂ into useful chemicals through advanced catalysis (solving which, he suggested, would earn two Nobel Prizes), and the production, transportation, and utilisation of green hydrogen at scale. These two challenges, he argued, are so deeply entangled that neither can be solved in the absence of the other. ‘All of this hangs on our ability to produce clean green hydrogen. The carbon problem is intimately related to the hydrogen problem.’
Then he introduced a figure that electrified the room: approximately 6% of global energy consumption is currently attributable to the digital and cyber world, and this fraction is growing exponentially. Every email, every query to a large language model, every cloud computation leaves a carbon footprint that the generation that grew up with paper assumed was zero. ‘I grew up with emails from the 1980s and used to think this was all free — in place of paper, so the cost to the environment is not there. I was wrong. Every email, every query on a large language model, is melting the polar ice.’ He projected that digital energy consumption could approach half of the physical world’s consumption within the lifetimes of people in the room.
Most striking, however, was Sharma’s philosophical coda. Drawing on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — which he called one of his favourite slides — he argued that civilisation has systematically substituted deficiency needs (food, shelter, safety, esteem) for growth needs (cognitive expression, aesthetic experience, self-transcendence), and that this substitution has no upper bound. ‘There are five cars and you can have eight. Eight and you can have eighteen. There is a necessary level to these needs but there is no sufficient level.’ The consequence: green technologies improve the efficiency of consumption by 5%, but consumption grows by more than 5%, so emissions never fall.
He then delivered the session’s most sombre, and perhaps its most honest, line: ‘I used to think the top problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought 30 years of good science could address those problems. But I was wrong.’ — he caught himself, employing his characteristic self-deprecating precision — ‘I should not say I was wrong. He was wrong is a statement.’ The top problems, he concluded, ‘are selfishness, greed, and apathy. To deal with those, we need a transformation, and we don’t know how to do that.’ No scientist, politician, or bureaucrat knows how to transform human motivation. ‘The heating of the environment outside is a reflection of the heating of the mind inside.’
It was a rare plenary address in which a senior scientist confessed, without flinching, that the problems his field exists to solve are, at their root, problems of human consciousness rather than chemistry. The room sat with it.
-Aditya
