Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 20 January 1939) is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist. He is currently Professor and Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, a post he has held since 2011. Chandra Wickramasinghe has written 24 books about astrophysics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television and film, and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. His research interests include the interstellar medium, infrared astronomy, light scattering theory, applications of solid-state physics to astronomy, the early Solar System, comets, astrochemistry, the origin of life and astrobiology. A student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle, the pair worked jointly for over 40 years as influential proponents of panspermia. In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic. He is currently a consultant team member of the Radio Science Investigation (RSI) experiment onbord the European Space Agencys Rosetta mission which will arrive at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014. He is also making further identifications of spectral features in comets and in the interstellar medium. More recently, Wickramasinghe has hypothesized that elementary living organisms like the lichen-forming alga spores present in the red rain in Kerala are of extraterrestrial origin, and that pathogens as the SARS virus also arrived on Earth from deep space carried in asteroids and comets. However, these speculations lack support from the scientific community and are at times published in the fringe Journal of Cosmology. In his role as media communicator, he has appeared on BBC Horizon, UK Channel 5 and the History Channel. He was featured on the 2013 Discovery Channel program Red Rain. He has a long association with Daisaku Ikeda, president of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai International, that led to the publication of a best-selling dialogue with him, first in Japanese and later in English, on the topic of Space and Eternal Life.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:15:05 +0000
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