Chandra Wickramasinghe

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

Wickramasinghe was educated at the University of Ceylon ( Bachelor 1960) and then with a Commonwealth Scholarship at the University of Cambridge ( Trinity College), where he received his doctorate in 1963 with Fred Hoyle. In the same year he became a Fellow of Jesus College. He was then at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and from 1973 Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at University College Cardiff, Cardiff University later. He built there a Astrophysics Working Group on within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, which he directed until 1989. From 2000, he was Director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology.

Wickramasinghe is a specialist in interstellar dust. He published in 1974 the theory that interstellar dust and the dust in the tails of comets is predominantly organic, which previously could not be confirmed. However, the existence of organic materials in the form of increasingly complex was confirmed in the interstellar dust since in many cases. Wickramasinghe, thus contributing along with Hoyle to the development of the theory to the (pseudo) panspermia. Together with Fred Hoyle he got the " International Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science" in 1986.

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

Wickramasinghe holds, inter alia, 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). 1982-1984 he was advisor to the President of Sri Lanka and was the 1983/84 founding director of the Institute for Fundamental Studies in Sri Lanka. In 1992 he received the honorary title in Sri Lanka Vidyaj Yothi and 1996 he received the International Prize for Science Sahabdeen.

Writings

  • With D.Ikeda: Space and Eternal Life, 1998; ISBN 1-85172-060 -X.
  • With 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 lifeforce, Paragon House, New York, 1990
  • With Hoyle Evolution from space - a theory of cosmic creationism, London, Dent, New York, Simon and Schuster 1981
  • Life with Hoyle cloud - 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 HCArp, Geoffrey Burbidge, Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar: The extragalactic universe: an alternative view, Nature, Vol 346, 1990, pp. 807-812
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