Meet Indian genius, a celebrated physicist, who was denied Nobel Prize in 2005, converted to Hinduism because..

Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan, popularly known as ECG Sudarshan, earned a name for himself in the field of theoretical physics. The scientist, born in 1931, was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. 

Despite being born in a Syrian Christian family, ECG Sudarshan converted to Hinduism after he married Lalita Rau in 1954. The marriage ended in divorce in 1990, after which ECG Sudarshan married Bhamathi Gopalakrishnan in Texas, US. 

ECG Sudarshan was an Indian genius who was highly qualified in his field of work and was regarded as having one of the brightest brains. He completed his studies at CMS College Kottayam and then obtained a graduation degree from the Madras Christian College. He then went on to work at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) with Dr Homi Bhabha.

But, ECG Sudarshan did not stop there. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York and moved to Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow.

Many are unaware that ECG Sudarshan was nominated for a Nobel Prize 9 times but never won it. In 1960, ECG Sudarshan began working on quantum optics at the University of Rochester. Two years into his work, ECG Sudarshan's use of classical electromagnetic theory in explaining optical fields was rebuked by Glauber. 

On the incident and what followed, a physicist wrote, "Glauber criticized Sudarshan’s representation, but his own was unable to generate any of the typical quantum optics phenomena, hence he introduces what he calls a P-representation, which was Sudarshan’s representation by another name. This representation, which had at first been scorned by Glauber, later became known as the Glauber–Sudarshan representation."

ECG Sudarshan was passed over for the Physics Nobel Prize many times. A major controversy about this broke in 2005 when a number of physicists wrote to the Swedish Academy. They demanded that Sudarshan should be acknowledged for his share of the Sudarshan diagonal representation (also known as Glauber–Sudarshan representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J Glauber won his share of the prize.

ECG Sudarshan in 2007 said, "The 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn't the one to get it. Each one of the discoveries that this Nobel was given for work based on my research," Hindustan Times report quoted him as saying. 

On not being selected for the 1979 Nobel, ECG Sudarshan said, "Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam built on work I had done as a 26-year-old student. If you give a prize for a building, shouldn’t the fellow who built the first floor be given the prize before those who built the second floor?"

ECG Sudarshan died in 2018 in Austin, US, at the age of 86.

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