Ravi Gomatam

About Ravi Gomatam

Ravi Veeraraghavan Gomatam (born 1950, in Chennai, India) is the Director of Bhaktivedanta Institute (Berkeley and Mumbai) and the newly formed Institute of Semantic Information Sciences and Technology (Berkeley and Mumbai). He is also Adjunct Professor at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, Rajasthan, India. Gomatam is one of the pioneers in the field of consciousness studies, which is an emerging inter-disciplinary scientific field. He organized the “First International Conference on the Study of Consciousness within Science” in January 1990 in San Francisco. The speakers at the 2-day conference included two Nobel Laureates (Sir John Eccles and George Wald) as well as twelve other distinguished researchers in the field (including Henry Stapp, John Searle, E.C.G. Sudarshan, Karl H. Pribram, Herbert Frohlich).

Subsequently, Gomatam conceived and launched the world's first M.S./Ph.D. programs in "consciousness studies", in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani (one of India's foremost technological universities). The program was inaugurated in 1997 by Charles Hard Townes, Nobel Laureate in physics (1964) and recipient of Templeton Prize (2005). Gomatam also teaches graduate students in this program. Graduates of this program have gone on to do further studies at distinguished institutions, including Harvard, Leeds and Utrecht universities. "Consciousness Studies" is a developing, inter-disciplinary scientific field, which Gomatam has particularly reconceived in a novel, original fashion, as a new way of studying matter.

Gomatam’s own field of research is foundations of quantum mechanics, wherein he is introducing a few new ideas, including those of “Objective, Semantic Information” and a notion of "Relational Properties" that is different from that of Rovelli and others. His new ideas have received notice for their potential. He has related research interests in semantic computation, systems sciences, artificial intelligence, philosophy of science and philosophy of language.

Research

Gomatam’s primary area of research is in non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM), which emerged in 1925 with Erwin Schrödinger's derivation of his now famous “wave equation”. This equation applies, in principle, to both microscopic regimes (atoms, sub-atomic particles) and to other larger regimes (mesoscopic, macroscopic and cosmological scales). However, in practice, quantum mechanics began by applying the wave equation to the micro regime, while treating the macroscopic regime as classical. Since all our laboratory observations are in the macroscopic regime, logically speaking, he says, we should apply the wave equation first to the macro regime before applying it to the micro regime. In his view, failure to do so in the history of QM has resulted in the famous “measurement problem” and a host of deep conceptual puzzles that plague microscopic QM even today. Thus, developing the application of QM to the macro regime, call it Macroscopic Quantum Mechanics (MQM), remains the most pressing, fundamental problem in all of modern physics. See Physics for the 21st Century, a new course at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, designed by Prof. Christopher Stubbs.

Gomatam is developing his own approach to MQM, which is distinct from the ideas of ‘macroscopic dissipative systems’ and ‘macroscopic quantum coherence’, developed in the early 80s by Anthony James Leggett, a Nobel Laureate in physics. In general, Leggett's attempt is to indirectly observe superposition at the macroscopic level by extending current microscopic quantum physics to the macroscopic level.

In contrast, Gomatam is attempting to develop MQM independent of the application of the Schrodinger equation to the micro regime, in such a manner that quantum superposition can be directly observed at the macroscopic level. This involves introducing a new notion of macroscopic objects as quantum kinds, instead of classical objects. In this regard, he is also developing two further new ideas within physics: the ontology of “Objective, Semantic Information” (OSI) and corresponding “Relational Properties” (RPs).

As part of developing his version of MQM, Gomatam has related interests in exotic manifolds, semantic information processing, quantum computation, and philosophy of ordinary language.