Chandra Wickramasinghe

Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe , FRSA (born January 20, 1939 in Colombo ) is a Sri Lankan astrophysicist .

Wickramasinghe

Wickramasinghe studied at the University of Ceylon (bachelor's degree in 1960) and then on a Commonwealth scholarship at Cambridge University (Trinity College), where he received his doctorate under Fred Hoyle in 1963. In the same year he became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge . He was then at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge and from 1973 Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at University College Cardiff, later Cardiff University . There he built an astrophysics working group within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, which he led until 1989. From 2000 he was director of the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology.

Wickramasinghe is a specialist in interstellar dust . He first published the theory in 1974 that interstellar dust and the dust in the tails of comets are predominantly organic , which has not yet been confirmed. However, the existence of organic materials in an increasingly complex form in interstellar dust has been confirmed many times since then. Wickramasinghe, together with Hoyle, contributed to the development of the theory of (pseudo-) panspermia . Together with Fred Hoyle he received the "International Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science" in 1986.

With Hoyle he suspected not only the origin of life (on earth), but also the origin of some infectious diseases in space, especially comets, which, according to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, are remnants of the formation of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune. In May 2003 he wrote a letter to the editor of the medical journal The Lancet (with Milton Wainwright, Jayant Narlikar ), in which they suspected an extraterrestrial origin of SARS .

Wickramasinghe holds the highest doctorate (ScD since 1973) from Cambridge University and an honorary doctorate from Soka University of Tokyo (1986) and the University of Ruhuna in Sri Lanka (2004). From 1982 to 1984 he was advisor to the President of Sri Lanka and was founding director of the Institute for Fundamental Studies in Sri Lanka in 1983/84. In 1992 he received the honorary title Vidyaj Yothi in Sri Lanka and in 1996 he received the International Sahabdeen Prize for Science.

Fonts

with D. Ikeda: Space and Eternal Life , 1998, ISBN 1-85172-060-X
with Fred Hoyle: Our Place In The Cosmos, Life Did Not Begin On Earth - It Arrived From Space And Is Still Arriving , JM Dent Ltd., Phoenix Publications 1988, 1993, ISBN 1-85799-433-7
A Journey with Fred Hoyle: The Search for Cosmic Life , World Scientific Publishing, 2005, ISBN 981-238-912-1
Interstellar Grains , London, Chapman and Hall 1967
with Hoyle: Theory of cosmic grains , Kluwer 1991
with Hoyle: Diseases from space , Harper and Row 1980
with Hoyle: Cosmic life force , Paragon House, New York, 1990
with Hoyle: Evolution from space - a theory of cosmic creationism , London, Dent, New York, Simon and Schuster 1981
with Hoyle: Lifecloud - evolution of life in the universe , Harper and Row, Dent and Sons, 1978, ISBN 0-460-04335-8
with Hoyle: From Grains to Bacteria , University College Cardiff Press 1984
with Hoyle: Space travelers - the bringers of life , University College Cardiff Press 1981
with HC Arp , Geoffrey Burbidge , Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar: The extragalactic universe: an alternative view , Nature, Vol. 346, 1990, pp. 807-812
The search for our cosmic ancestry , World Scientific, New Jersey 2015, ISBN 978-981-461696-6

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Wickramasinghe, Chandra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Wickramasinghe, Nalin Chandra (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Sri Lankan astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 20, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH	Colombo