You are a non Buddhist.

Thanks!

It is different with Prof Cyril Ponnamperuma who was born a Christian and died a Christian. Such people have no place in the history or future of Sri Lanka.

From the time we won the war in May 2009 Sri Lanka is only for Sinhalese Buddhists. Others are guests who must serve the majority’s interests and needs.

Arthur C. Clarke and Pof. Ponnamperuma are treasures of the scientific world and they are Lanka’s prize possessions.

I cannot understand the bile seeping out of some commentators towards Porf. Ponnamperuma and Nalaka. This kind of attitude has always been an impediment in our country’s progress.

J

When I first visited him I saw that the geographic center of ideas was no longer in Europe or the United States. One could live anywhere and have ideas and promote ideas and make the world pay attention to those ideas.

My first visit saw me sitting in the chair once occupied by Yuri Gagarin and Buckminster Fuller. People came to see him to try out their ideas and get his reaction and his build on their ideas.

Another time he called me because I was supposedly the great computer expert in Sri Lanka. Shaking in my boots that he would find out I was nowhere near the expert in computing that I touted myself as, I went to his house.

At the time he was working on the movie script for 2010. He had named two files with the same name and wanted to delete one of them and not delete both. Thank God that I knew how to fix that minor problem.

We talked a lot about the future. He told me that his wish for Sri Lanka was that it skip the 20th century. They managed to achieve that in Telecommunications. They completely abandiodned putiing in land lines and did not create an environment where you would be paying maintenance for the next 100 years as does those advanced technological societies in Europe and the USA.

He also told me that the best medicine in the world would come from the “South”. (He looked the world as being divided between North and South rather than East and West). His argument was similar to the telecommunications jungle that the North got itself in.

Medicne is controled and structured by the regulatory bodies represented by the American Medical Association and similar British and Eurpean clubs.

Sri Lanka doesn’t have that burden to carry and they can devise no less quality medical specialties than the North with different and more direct forms of education because they are not shakled by the bindings of the North.

I will not soon forget my visits to Sri Lanka, Columbo, Kandy, Hickadoa , Galle and many other world famous spots but most of all I’ll remember my visits to Bond Place.

I have met thousands of people in my life…some positive some negative. Arthur C Clarke would not have hired Nalaka 20 plus years ago if he was negative. Arthur was always positive and Nalaka was and is the same. Nalaka is an intelligent…humble…kind, gentle, positive human being. It was a joy to meet him and know him….TDS must have the wrong Nalaka Gunawardena….

It’s nice to see Nalaka Gunawardena calling for the nurture of intellectual and creative abilities of Sri Lanka’s youth. Unfortunately, when I was a youngster in school, he was far from ‘nurturing’ – he had already achieved some level of local recognition as a science writer but did not want to see anyone else succeed in that vocation. He was positively discouraging, and placed a number of roadblocks in my path.

To 21st Century Fox: please stop denigrating the memory of Prof. Cyril Ponnamperuma. I can personally attest that he encouraged all youngsters that had the privilege of meeting him regardless of ethnicity or religion. What’s the basis for calling him a ‘dubious scientist’? His scientific contributions and impact are recognized by his peers the world over, if not by narrow-minded individuals like you. Many of us were inspired by him both as a scientist and as a human being.

Every writer exercises her discretion and choice in writing anything, as I did here. I cited both examples that started right and then went astray (IFS, ACCIMT) as well as current initiatives that give us something to celebrate (LIRNEasia, IRD). It’s a pity that you’ve allowed yourself to be so distracted by examples and missed the larger generic point I was making.

If you don’t like the late Cyril Ponnamperuma (or Christians, or Amerians, or whatever) that’s a personal choice you are fully entitled to have. But to make sweeping statements about international conspiracies based purely on personal likes and dislikes is rather far-fetched, and not consistent with the teachings of the Buddha that I know. That’s not even imagination, more like paranoia. The Sinhala Buddhist cause, however you might define it, is not going to be served by this kind of insular pettiness.

“I am not indulging in false modesty…when I say that my own contribution to satellite communications was largely a matter of luck. I happened to be in the right place, at the right time….Communications and astronautics were inextricably entangled in my mind, with results that now seem inevitable. If I had not proposed the idea of geostationary relays in my Wireless World letter of February 1945, and developed it in more detail the following October, half a dozen other people would have quickly done so. I suspect that my early disclosure may have advanced the cause of space communications by approximately fifteen minutes.

“Or perhaps twenty. My efforts to promote and publicise the idea may have been much more important than conceiving it. In 1952, ‘The Exploration of Space’ introduced communications satellites to several hundred thousand people – including John Pierece…”

The full acceptance speech is included in ‘Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography’ by Arthur C Clarke (John Wiley & Sons, 1984). http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Orbit-Autobiography-Arthur-Clarke/dp/047187910X

More about Marconi fellowship itself is found at:
http://marconisociety.org/fellows_clarke.html

… I have sometiems been credited with the discovery of the stationary
orbit itself, which of course is ridiculous. No one could have
“discovered” this, since its existence was perfectly obvious from the
time of Newton (if not Kepler!). I will be astonished if it has not
often appeared in astronomical literature – perhaps when Asaph Hall
discovered the satellites of Mars in 1877. The small outer moon, Deimos,
is not far beyond the stationary orbit, and Phobos is well inside it.

The Russian pioneer Tisiolkovsky took the concept for granted but did
not develop it; radio, of course, was in its infancy when he was writing
around the turn of the century. Not until 1928 did the somewhat shadowy
Austrian captain H. Potocnik, writing under the name Hermann Noordung,
develop the engineering aspects of the manned space station in great
detail – and place it in the stationary orbit! He naturally assumed that
there would be radio links between Earth and station.

http://kanabona.com/?q=science_geostationery_orbit_herman_vs_clarke

1 http://bhaak.dyndns.org/buchscans/noordung.html
2 http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4026/contents.html
3 http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html

COMMENT FROM A PERCEPTIVE READER:
Nalaka: you have beautifully captured the essence of Arthur C. Clarke’s life
on our planet. And you are right: no graven image can do justice to the
reach of his spirit. But the ‘grand prize’ you advocate is, I fear,
unattainable. We need to accept that Arthur was a stranger in our land — as
much as a few of us admired and loved him. The spirit of objective, liberal
secularism he represented was as alien to the Sri Lankan people at the time
he came to our shores half a century ago as it was when he left us last
year. A society as steeped in bigotry as ours is is most unlikely to give
rise (at least not locally) to men like Arthur. If it did, we would only
shoot them down with all dispatch. To minds as small as ours, his
homosexuality would have outweighed his genius. But I take your point: he
should not be allowed to pass uncelebrated in the land in which he found
domicile. Heaven knows that even in the past year he has been celebrated
much more poignantly by an admiring world than by the inhabitants of his
foster home. I can’t help thinking that if the religious zealots and
purveyors of superstition in our country were to be confronted with Clarke’s
Laws, they would stone his memory to death.

Many thanks for your wonderfully constructive comment – so much in the spirit of Sir Arthur!

Your idea of a science centre to inspire youth is an excellent one, and heartily echo your approach of doing so ‘with the minimum of administration’ (If the British invented bureaucracy, we in South Asia have perfected it!).

In fact, the idea of just such a science centre has been discussed for over 20 years in Sri Lanka. It was to be along the lines of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, http://www.exploratorium.edu, where the young (and young-at-heart) can learn about aspects of science by doing, and just as importantly, have fun while doing it! Fun is precisely what is so lacking in, and kept out of, our teaching and learning of science.

As the single parent of a 12-year-old eager and energetic child, I can appreciate very well the value of inspiration during the formative years. Yet, despite governmental and private plans to set up a science centre in Sri Lanka, nothing ever materialised. Perhaps the reason is that most people involved in such efforts, well meaning as they are, have now forgotten what it was like to be children and have a sense of wonder, to be in awe of nature and the world…

A good Lankan friend of Sir Arthur who has been trying hard to get a science centre off the ground is the inventor-aviator-tropical farmer Ray Wijewardene, http://sundaytimes.lk/070527/Plus/pls10.html I will now take up your idea, and kind offer, with him and see how we can take it forward, this time with nothing official about it. That, we know, is the only way to get results in a place like Sri Lanka: follow Nike’s motto and ‘Just do it’.

My husband and I were so very pleased to name Serendipaceratops after Arthur and I think he was pretty pleased with it too. We miss his emails so much and I wish he could have lived to be 150.

With warmth. Patricia and Thomas