Star Stuff

The campus of the Institute for Plasma Research in the village Bhat in the outskirts of Ahmedabad stood out in a city which is renowned for its architectural gems. Visitors to the campus make interesting comments about the layout. The necessity for the extra wide corridors has been attributed to accommodate the oversized egos of the scientists working there! The building has been called a Taj Mahal. But the most cryptic comment was made by Lech Walesa, the former President of Poland, who after being escorted around the building, said that the building was even more convoluted than the science we were doing!

As the person in charge of these visits, I have had to listen to these comments and witness the usual awe and surprise when the visitors saw all kinds of plasma physics devices — machines as we call them.

The person escorted into my office one day was introduced as Kunwar Sahib, a tall, elegant man, a descendant of the Suryavanshis, the Dynasty of the Sun. He was wrapped in a linen bandhgala that looked crisp enough to cut glass. He smelled of marigolds and expensive sandalwood. He had come on an inquisitive visit to the Institute for Plasma Research, thanks to the architectural fame the place had acquired. I was to take him around.

After a general tour of the labs where plasmas in various forms could be seen, I took him to the Tokamak hall, where the huge and complex magnetic confinement machine, which we had named ADITYA, was being assembled. The vacuum pumps thrummed and overhead crane waited while its red lights flickered.

“You see,” I began, intent on making an impression, gesturing toward the gleaming steel chamber visible inside a nest of magnetic coils, “we are trying to bottle the Sun. Plasma is star stuff. It is the fourth state of matter, so energetic that electrons are ripped entirely from their nuclei. It is exactly what the Sun is made of.”

Kunwar Sahib had a gleam in his eye. He looked at the gigantic machine, complex beyond his imagination. His eyes, previously glazed over by academic jargon, suddenly ignited with a deep, ancestral fervor.

“Star stuff,” he murmured, his voice echoing in the concrete lab. “A fragment of the Sun.”

“Precisely,” I said, feeling rather proud of my poetic framing.

He turned to me, completely serious. “I want a globule of it.”

I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“A small sphere. A glass vial, perhaps,” he said, gesturing with a manicured hand. “I want you to trap a small sphere of this solar matter for me. I will place it in my puja ghar, the mini-temple at my estate in Udaipur. We are Suryavanshis. It is only appropriate that we keep a living sample of our ancestor at home to worship.”

A cold sweat broke out on my neck. The senior lab technician in the corner suddenly found his clipboard intensely fascinating and refused to look up.

“Kunwar Sahib,” I stammered, frantically searching for a way to break the laws of thermodynamics gently to royalty. “The plasma in this machine will be held in place by a powerful magnetic field. If it touches the glass, it will cool down instantly and cease to exist. Furthermore, it requires very high voltages and a vacuum system to stay alive. If I put it in a jar for you, the moment you walk out that door, it will just turn into a puff of completely ordinary gas.”

The Kunwar Sahib frowned. It was a subtle shift of the eyebrows, but it carried the weight of several centuries of absolute veto power. “Surely, with all this government funding, you can make a self-sustaining sphere? A small flame that does not go out?”

He wanted a perpetual solar miracle for his altar, and I was offering him a dead vacuum tube. I needed an elegant exit — something that honoured his lineage but protected our credibility.

I took a deep breath. “Kunwar Sahib, to possess a true piece of the Sun’s light at home, you do not need our complex, temperamental machinery. The Sun’s energy is democratic. In fact, I highly advise that you stop at an electrical shop on your way back.”

He tilted his head. “The electrical shop?”

“Yes. Buy a standard T8 fluorescent lamp.”

Kunwar Sahib stared at me. The lab tech snorted into his tea.

“A tubelight?” the royal guest asked, his voice dripping with sudden skepticism.

“A tubelight,” I nodded vigorously, stepping over to our overhead fixture. “Inside that ordinary glass tube is a low-pressure gas. When you flip the switch, electricity surges through it, ionizing the atoms. Kunwar Sahib, a burning fluorescent lamp is literally filled with a glowing cylinder of low-temperature plasma. It is the exact same physics as the northern lights, and a direct cousin to the solar corona.”

I smiled, offering a respectful nod. “You don’t need a high-energy physics laboratory to honor the Sun. You just need a twelve watt CFL to have your temple illuminated by the fourth state of matter.”

The Kunwar Sahib stood in silence for a long moment, looking from the multi-million dollar reactor to the flickering, slightly buzzing fluorescent fixture on the ceiling.

Slowly, the sternness melted from his face, replaced by a wry, appreciative smile. He realized he had been gently outmaneuvered by a terrified functionary.

“A fluorescent lamp,” he chuckled softly, shaking his head. “Science takes the romance out of the heavens, yet somehow puts it right into the ceiling.”

He didn’t get his bottled star that day, but as he left, he shook my hand and promised that the next time he turned on the lights in his bedroom, he would offer a small prayer to his ancestors.