India, May 20 -- Jayant Vishnu Narlikar passed away in the early hours of May 20, following a brief illness. He was an internationally known astrophysicist and cosmologist, but he was also a great enabler. He made it possible for hundreds of aspiring young persons to succeed as scientists, and at the same time informed and inspired the general public across the country with his talks, books, and tales, in English, Marathi, and Hindi.

Narlikar first rose to fame as a student of Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge in England. With Hoyle, he worked in the 1960s on a new theory of gravity and the Steady State theory of the universe. These profound ideas received a great deal of attention, and the young Narlikar quickly became well-know...