1. Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe was born on 20 January 1939 and is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist of Sinhalese ethnicity.
21 Facts About Chandra Wickramasinghe
1. 2.
Chandra Wickramasinghe has written more than 40 books about astrophysics and related topics; he has made appearances on radio, television and film, and he writes online blogs and articles.
3.
Chandra Wickramasinghe has appeared on BBC Horizon, UK Channel 5 and the History Channel.
4.
Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared on the 2013 Discovery Channel program "Red Rain".
5.
Chandra Wickramasinghe has an association with Daisaku Ikeda, president of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai International, that led to the publication of a dialogue with him, first in Japanese and later in English, on the topic of Space and Eternal Life.
6.
Chandra Wickramasinghe studied at Royal College, Colombo, the University of Ceylon, and at Trinity College and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD and ScD degrees.
7.
Chandra Wickramasinghe was a consultant and advisor to the President of Sri Lanka from 1982 to 1984, and played a key role in founding the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Sri Lanka.
8.
Chandra Wickramasinghe maintains his part-time position as a UK Professor at Cardiff University.
9.
In 2017, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe was appointed adjunct professor in the Department of Physics, at the University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka.
10.
Chandra Wickramasinghe was awarded a PhD degree in mathematics in 1963 and was elected a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge in the same year.
11.
Chandra Wickramasinghe published the first definitive book on Interstellar Grains in 1967.
12.
Chandra Wickramasinghe has made many contributions to this field, publishing over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals, over 75 of which are in Nature.
13.
Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe further proposed a radical kind of panspermia that included the claim that extraterrestrial life forms enter the Earth's atmosphere and were possibly responsible for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases, and genetic novelty that Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe contended was necessary for macroevolution.
14.
In 1974 Chandra Wickramasinghe first proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic, and followed this up with other research confirming the hypothesis.
15.
Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed and confirmed the existence of polymeric compounds based on the molecule formaldehyde.
16.
Chandra Wickramasinghe was involved in coordinating analyses of the red rain in Kerala in collaborations with Godfrey Louis.
17.
Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have advanced the argument that various outbreaks of illnesses on Earth are of extraterrestrial origins, including the 1918 flu pandemic and certain outbreaks of polio and mad cow disease.
18.
On 24 May 2003 The Lancet published a letter from Chandra Wickramasinghe, jointly signed by Milton Wainwright and Jayant Narlikar, in which they hypothesised that the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome could be extraterrestrial in origin instead of originating from chickens.
19.
The rocks were sent to the University of Cardiff in Wales for analysis, where Chandra Wickramasinghe's team analyzed them and claimed that they contained extraterrestrial diatoms.
20.
However, independent experts in meteoritics stated that the object analyzed by Chandra Wickramasinghe's team was of terrestrial origin, a fulgurite created by lightning strikes on Earth.
21.
Chandra Wickramasinghe was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to science, astronomy and astrobiology.