Science poses surprises - sometimes failures and sometimes successes, according to Nobel laureate Serge Haroche, who said on Wednesday that Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists will certainly try to fix the problem with India’s first moon lander.
“I don’t know what happened with this (moon lander Vikram) but they will certainly try to solve the problem,” Haroche, 75, told IANS on the sidelines of the ‘Nobel Prize Series India 2019’ event here, near the state capital Chandigarh.
An optimistic Haroche, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2012, said failures occur in science. “Science is something where you are going in the unknown...you have surprises, sometime good surprises and sometime you have bad surprises and failures,” Haroche explained, whose research has mostly taken place in the Kastler Brossel laboratory at the Ecole Normale Superieure in France.
Categorically saying that he is ignorant about what actually happened with the moon lander, Haroche said the equipmet had worked up to the last stage and then “you have some kind of failure”.
The problem, he said, was that there was too much expectation and excessive media attention around the mission, and “when you lose, you take the risk that when there is a failure, there is a big amplification of disappointment and so on”.
“I think the people who work in this area should know that there are failures. Since a lot of money is involved in science, it has to do with economic and politics and I don’t like this mixture,” he said.