Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drew large audiences to two separate lectures in Karachi within a week, addressing students, faculty and the wider public at the University of Karachi and Habib University. The Pakistani American astrophysicist, who grew up and received her early education in Karachi before moving to the United States, is a leading figure in the Nobel Prize winning LIGO collaboration. Her visit closed with the 10th Yohsin Lecture at Habib University on Friday, where an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people made their way to the campus, with long queues and people filling spaces across the university to hear her in person. Habib University said the lecture was among the most widely attended in the history of the series.
The first of the two talks took place on Tuesday at the Chinese Teachers Memorial Auditorium at the University of Karachi, which was packed to capacity. Titled Listening to the Universe Above the Quantum Din, the lecture was organised under the Distinguished Lecture Series by the Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialisation, in collaboration with the Department of Physics and the Institute of Space Science and Technology. Dr Mavalvala explained how gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted, are generated when massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars orbit one another and eventually merge. She described how LIGO detects these waves using L shaped interferometers roughly four kilometres long at two observatories in Washington and Louisiana, combined with highly stable, low noise lasers with a wavelength of 1,064 nanometres. She noted that averaging measurements from large numbers of photons further improves accuracy, allowing the instruments to detect changes far smaller than anything perceptible to humans despite environmental vibrations and noise. Referring to her PhD supervisor Prof Rainer Weiss, she said the concept behind modern detectors was proposed in the 1970s, and that scientists recorded direct signals of gravitational waves for the first time in 2015. She also pointed to the observed merger of two black holes about 1.2 billion light years away, each nearly 30 times the mass of the Sun.
At Habib University, the lecture titled The Joy of Discovery: Curiosity, Science, and the Pivotal Role of Universities shifted from the physics of LIGO to the question of why people seek knowledge at all, particularly knowledge with no obvious immediate use. Reflecting on humanity’s appetite for curiosity, she said even pre human cultures looked up at the sky because it was mysterious, adding that a hundred years from now the only thing that will matter is that scientists opened a new window into the universe. She pushed back against the idea that curiosity must justify itself in advance, arguing that some of the most consequential discoveries began as questions with no obvious payoff, and that universities carry a responsibility beyond training professionals to cultivate wonder, creativity, perseverance and intellectual freedom. Habib University President Wasif Rizvi said access of this kind had not been attempted in Pakistan before and credited the community of Mohsineen whose generosity makes the university’s education accessible. Dr Mavalvala thanked the university leadership and said the students and alumni she met had left her impressed. During the extended question and answer session, she said every person is research minded at birth and that the difference in adulthood is access to opportunity, adding that research shows no government investment has a greater return than investment in research and science.
The Habib University lecture capped a two day visit during which Dr Mavalvala toured the campus, held a conversation with faculty on nurturing curiosity in the classroom, and met science and humanities students from leading schools across Karachi. She also spent time with Habib University students and alumni and joined sessions with the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation and Pakistan’s wider scientific community, with discussions focused on strengthening investment in homegrown scientific and academic excellence. Her talks with university leadership also touched on how a liberal arts undergraduate institution can keep cultivating students’ appetite for curiosity, along with the value of teaching and mentorship. The Yohsin Lecture Series, built on the university’s founding philosophy of Yohsin, the thoughtful cultivation of the self, has previously brought speakers including Noam Chomsky, Ashis Nandy, Reza Aslan, Azra Raza and Thomas Blom Hansen to Karachi. Together, the two lectures gave audiences in the city a rare chance to hear both the technical detail of gravitational wave research and a broader argument for public investment in science from one of its most prominent Pakistani born figures.
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