Physics ahoy!
Here’s good news for Indian physical sciences.
The National Science Indicators of Thomson Reuters show that the number of papers indexed from India has grown from about 20,000 in 2003 to 27,000 in 2007. Of this, the main field indexed is the multi-disciplinary category (papers published in multidisciplinary journals Nature, Science, PNAS etc) – 5.47 per cent. Close behind is Materials Science -- 5.45 per cent.
Materials Science has had the steepest growth from 432 papers in 1981 to 2,300 papers in 2007 with India-based authors. India's share of world papers, in the latest five-year period, was also comparatively high in Agricultural Sciences (5.17% of the database), Chemistry (5.04%), and Physics (3.88%).
Overall, all but three of the top ten research fronts with the highest representation of India institutions were in high-energy or theoretical physics.
Kudos to the physical scientists of this country!
Comments
In India, the earliest applications of chemistry were in the context of medicine, metallurgy, construction technology (such as manufacture of cement and paints) and in textile production and dyeing. But in the process of understanding chemical processes, there also emerged a concomitant interest in attempting to describe the basic elements of matter - what they were composed of, and how they interacted with each other to produce new substances. Natural phenomenon were studied in the context of tides, rainfall, appearance of the sun, the moon and stellar formations, changes in season, weather patterns and agriculture. (For instance, Vedic literature mentions the condensation of water vapour from seas and oceans due to evaporation caused by the sun's heat and the subsequent formation of clouds and rain.) This naturally led to theories about physical processes and the forces of nature that are today studied as specific topics within the fields of chemistry and physics.
Posted by: Albert | November 3, 2008 01:56 PM