Philip the Bard's Harappan Blog: The sad story of Debendra Gavaskar

The Sad Story of Debendra Gavaskar

One of the common stories from Max’s childhood and youth was the, much too often, occurrence of people asking her if she was related to Debendra Gavaskar. She had to reply over and over that no, he was born many years after Max’s ancestors left Earth with Marcus Johnson.

Now poor old Debendra is almost lost to history. The starship named after him no longer exists and the entire galaxy thinks the Gavaskar Field was named after Max.

Who was he? He discovered the Gavaskar Field or underspace. On Earth in the early Twenty-first Century there was a lot of research into the nature of matter and Higgs Field Theory was developed. 

The later part of the century was dominated by environmental disasters and research took a back seat to reconstruction. When the environment was repaired and things started to settle down the SID was formed.

The Leadership Council of the Greenies ran things through their Scribes and Criers networks. The Science and Industry Division was established to provide for humanity what the Green agrarian life style could not. The SID ran factories, mostly automated and universities.

Debendra was born in Earth Year 2230. When he was seven he was drafted into the SID university system. He was a lab assistant in 2256 when they first discovered illumaphane.

It was studies with the strange mineral that led Debendra to his discovery. His genius was to connect the physics of the Higgs Field and quantum mechanics to the force of gravity and the structure of matter on the universal scale. The new mineral was the only thing found up till then that had any effect on gravity. The illumaphane made it possible to discover the workings of gravity and revealed the underlying structure of matter.

He proved the bubble universe theory first proposed in the Twentieth Century by Stephen Hawking and others. The field was named after him and humanitie’s second starship based on his theories bore his name. (the first being The Marcus Johnson)

When Max made her discovery about the Gavaskar Field it opened up the galaxy to exploration in ways it never had been before. Max became the most famous person in the galaxy and from then on everyone assumed the Gavaskar Field was named after her and Debendra was almost lost to history.

Tomorrow: Back to stories from Max's youth.