'This book is a part of my soul,' says Vishveshwara

Illinois Physics Professor Smitha Vishveshwara publishes a deep dive into the Two Revolutions of relativity and quantum physics, collaborating with her renowned father.

Vishveshwara. “Lord of the Universe” in Sanskrit. A name that is a lot to live up to. A name that Smitha Vishveshwara, a professor at Illinois Physics, wears with obvious delight  and determination—not so much because of its religious origins, but because it was her father’s name.

Channapattana Venkata Vishveshwara, or Vishu, was a physicist too. Some called him “the Black Hole Man of India”—perhaps a step down from “Lord of the Universe,” but quite the appellation, nonetheless.

“This book is a part of my soul. There is, I hope, a universal story here about the relationship between a parent and a child. My father gifted me the cosmos, and he did so to a million others.”

— Smitha Vishveshwara

Early in his career, C. V. Vishveshwara described the way in which black holes can emit radiation in a decaying or “ringdown” pattern, later to become known as the quasinormal mode (QNM). The black hole QNM, his prediction and focus for decades, remains a crucial element of our understanding of the universe. He completed this work in 1970, before the term black hole had even been coined.

C.V. Vishveshwara died in 2017. But, before his passing, father and daughter embarked on a long journey. Together, they began writing a book. Ultimately titled “Two Revolutions: Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Physics,” it was recently published by Oxford University Press.

While C. V. Vishveshwara served as the expert on relativity, Smitha Vishveshwara served as the expert on quantum. Her research is rooted in quantum condensed matter physics, the study of individual particles coming together as a collective whole. Quantum condensed matter physics spans a range of phenomena from superfluidity and nanomaterials to exotic quantum particles such as anyons, and even to biophysics and gravity. Smitha Vishveshwara is a Simons Fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and former chair of the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics.

“This book is a part of my soul,” Smitha Vishveshwara says in a recent interview. “There is, I hope, a universal story here about the relationship between a parent and a child. My father gifted me the cosmos, and he did so to a million others.”

Reflecting the cosmic proportions of their name, the Vishveshwaras have written a book that tells of great upsets of the status quo—the death of entire ways of looking at the universe, sea-changes in physics from its smallest particles to its largest structures.

Genre-bending

I’ve had a stirring within me. An urge to share, to share with you a fantastic journey of the past two decades. A journey that has led me to catch vision upon vision of an awe-inspiring perspective of the physical world, that of quantum physics. I have understood its story little by little, grown wholly enamored by its wonders, and continued to be intrigued by its mysteries…With you across the globe, we may not be able to sit beside each other talking at length, or look into each other’s eyes, observing shades of puzzlement or joy, or scribble diagrams or equations on paper napkins over a scrumptious meal. But we could write to each other, week after week, as we often do. Share by way of letters not only with each other, but with any and all who would like to join us on our meanderings through these two awe-inspiring worlds.

—Letter from Smitha Vishveshwara to Vishu Vishveshwara, July 2013

Two Revolutions is told as a series of reflections, transcripts, imagined vignettes, and letters, back and forth across the miles. The Vishveshwaras provide deep, detailed lessons on their respective areas of expertise. But to simply say that the book mulls the 100 years since the inception of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity doesn’t do it justice.

The Vishveshwaras are spirited, full of wordplay and jokes. They quote poets and sacred texts, Dr. Suess and Lewis Carroll. He calls her Smee and Dotty. She calls him Apps and, at one point on a flight headed to Spain, Popsicle.

Charlie Chaplin is used to illustrate how distances don’t change in spacetime. Cookie Monster guest-stars in a discussion of qubits. Mother Goose and Ernest Rutherford appear in the same paragraph. Despite Smitha Vishveshwara’s concern that they wouldn’t be able to scribble on napkins together, hand-drawn illustrations appear alongside equations—a hitchhiker with her bindle observes a passing car, a cowboy fires his six-shooter.

Erudite but equally engaging. Personal on even the most impersonal of topics. Masterful and full of joy, simultaneously.

“There’s a scriptured way of teaching quantum physics—what you study in the text. It is Schroedinger’s equation, handed to you as the writ law. Doing the research for the book, I also got to see how human members of the physics canon are and how there’s scope to further their explorations even today,” Smitha Vishveshwara says.

That humanity brought a sense of humility to the fore. “I do not subscribe to a religion in the traditional sense…but I do think that science cannot answer everything. We are limited in our human perception, and I delight in how it gives way to the mysterious, to awe.”

Richard Blanco—who read his poem “One Day” at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration—was moved by the perspective and approach. His blurb for the book’s cover reads, “Through this genre-bending book where physics intersects with memoir, history, prayer, poetry, and the intimate art of letter writing…This is physics that makes us smile, sigh, cry, laugh, look into the mirror and peer into the mysteries of who we are primordially.”

The wings are just unfolding

Somehow, deep, deep down, we must all know that we come from the cosmos. That we will return to it. That we are truly stardust. Some speak of the kingdom of Heaven or a land of afterlife, some say angels may exalt to receive us, some say that the soul follows the paths of the Sun and Moon, some believe in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Science may never reveal the journey of the soul. But Science, Natural Philosophy, tells us how our mortal flesh came to be

—Letter from Smitha Vishveshwara to Vishu Vishveshwara, October 2015

The Vishveshwara family was always steeped in the arts. Smitha Vishveshwara’s grandfather, C.K. Venkataramaiah, wrote Shakespearean-style epic plays in Kannada, a language of southwestern India, that were performed throughout the country. An uncle, who lived with the family during Smitha Vishveshwara’s childhood, trained as a violinist. Simon and Garfunkel, Pete Seeger, and western classical music played on the stereo.

After a long career at the Raman Research Institute and as a professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, C. V. Vishveshwara became the founding director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium in Bengaluru for more than 15 years.

“He would script his own shows. He would work with musicians, with visual artists. He would bring alive, in a sense, the cosmos to the masses. It was the confluence of art and science,” Smitha Vishveshwara says. “My father infused a lot of that zest. Laughter and humor. The feeling of awe and wonder. These attributes make their way into our book.”

The collaboration with her father “opened the floodgates to bringing the arts into my career.”

“It used to be physics during the day and arts during the night…in the past years, I was able to merge the two. In communion with fellow-explorers. Embracing more of who I am. And since then, the growth has continued. No longer suppressing love, enthusiasm, and playfulness in my job, all as essential to science as rigor and analysis. No longer hesitant in telling youngsters to seek their passion, to find their authentic voices.”

Since starting the book, Smitha Vishveshwara has conceived and staged a set of major performing arts pieces at the confluence of quantum condensed matter physics and the arts. “Quantum Voyages”—created with Latrelle Bright, a theater professor at Illinois—tells the story of two explorers guided through quantum realms by the spirit of wisdom. The multimedia piece “Quantum Rhapsodies”—created with the Jupiter String Quartet and a visualization team at the Beckman Institute—meditates on the quantum world and its role in our daily lives and in the universe. Smitha Vishveshwara and Bright have joined with the musician Stephen Taylor to bring together an arts-science collective called CASCaDe, or Collective for Arts-Science Creativity and Discovery, etc., as well.

Smitha Vishveshwara also regularly teaches a project-based course that she developed called “Where the Arts Meets Physics.” Even her dissertation was titled “A Three-Act Play of Strongly Correlated Electrons.”

“Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps” premiered at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting in 2023. This physics-inspired circus show was conceived with and performed by Le PeTiT CiRqUe, a group of aerialists, acrobats, and musicians from Los Angeles. The group will join a reenactment of Quantum Voyages at the 2025 APS Global Physics Summit as part of the International Year of Quantum. Smitha Vishveshwara is a member of the UNESCO-based international steering committee overseeing the year of programming and events.

“It’s a unique persona that I wouldn’t have imagined, where one can embrace it all, art, science, humanity,” Smitha Vishveshwara says. “The moment you open up to all that you are and all the world has to offer—it’s wings. Awe, wonder, mystery, play. The wings are just unfolding.”

Phase Transition

We know how birds cheep sound waves and traffic lights radiate light waves. What do black holes emit? Quasinormal modes. The black hole responds in its unique voice through gravitational radiation. You captured it in that radiation waveform in your Nature paper. The paper which is now Reference 8 in the pioneering LIGO gravitational wave discovery paper, following references to papers by Einstein and Schwarzschild!

—Letter from Smitha Vishveshwara to Vishu Vishveshwara, March 2016

In February 2016, the international physics community was abuzz. Rumors trickled out that the LIGO experiment had, at long last, observed gravitational waves for the first time. The Vishveshwaras swapped emails and phone calls with snippets of news and possibilities. The scuttlebutt was true, and the announcement finally came. C. V. Vishveshwara traveled India in the days following with various organizations honoring his work on QNMs in the 1960s.

“The discovery brought Vishu tremendous euphoria, as he had dreamed of it for over four decades. It even showed traces of his pioneering predictions ... of signature emissions from black holes,” Smitha Vishveshwara wrote, but “on the heels of euphoria came misfortune.”

C. V. Vishveshwara suffered a fall a few months later, developed a hematoma, and breathed his last in January 2017.

Smitha Vishveshwara would work between brief trips into the intensive care unit to see her father, writing in his study. The last third of “Two Revolutions turns to memoir and to transcripts of lectures C. V. Vishveshwara gave during celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the theory of general relativity.

Smitha Vishveshwara reflects on MRI as a “grand miracle of modern science, quantum physics, and medicine.” Nuclear medicine was always to be part of their book, but now it takes on new meaning. These are the folds of her own father’s brain that she is considering. The hydrogen nuclei within his own body are precessing in high magnetic fields and awaiting the MRI machine’s call to produce images of those folds.

She ponders on the magnets. “Look toward the heavens, and the Universe itself is said to exist in a state of some cosmic order. Imagine the ancients on their ships, gazing at this hidden cosmic order, guided by a terrestrial object of [another] mysterious order, the lodestone, attracted to rocks, gems. That mysterious stone, like iron, nothing more and nothing less than a magnet, a chunk of the material magnetite, that below a transition temperature becomes a compass, drawn by the Earth’s field, forever pointing north.”

In her final days with her father and after, Smitha Vishveshwara asks, “With all that is happening in our lives right now, isn’t it rather appropriate to talk of phase transitions? Of the crying need to seek order amidst disorder, to act collectively as a community of strongly interconnected individuals?”

She finishes the book with a series of vignettes, spanning their life together and capturing the rest of what her father intended to write about in his letters about the universe. She concludes:

“Your spirit guides me through it all, that sunlit, mirthful, profound spirit with which you lived Life. I revel at the wonder surrounding us, I exalt at the light and the darkness, I embrace love, loss, joy, sadness, and the dancing spirit ... How glorious that imprinted in our speck of spacetime, we reflect everything that began and emerged from the embryonic Universe!

With Love Infinite,

Your Cosmic Companion and Child”

 

Join Smitha Vishveshwara and national poet laureate Richard Blanco on April 21 from 5 to 7 p.m. for a poetry and prose reading and book signing at the Illini Union's South Lounge. Watch for more details to come!