Famous Scientist Ravi Gomatam

 

Ravi Gomatam

Ravi Veeraraghavan Gomatam (born 1950, in Chennai, India) is the Director of Bhaktivedanta Institute (Berkeley and Mumbai) and the newly formed Institute for 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",[2] in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani (one of India's foremost technological universities).

The program was inaugurated in 1997 in the presence of Charles Hard Townes, Nobel Laureate in physics. Gomatam also teaches graduate students in this program. In fourteen short years, 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 conceived in a novel, original fashion, as a study of 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.

In the 70s Gomatam worked with India’s international airline on their software development projects. He then moved to the USA and worked as a freelance consultant for a number of Fortune-500 companies including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Burroughs and IBM in the areas of operating system design, data communications and very-large database design.

Starting from the early 80s, Gomatam turned to fundamental scientific research, and started contributing to the development of the Bhaktivedanta Institute(B.I.) in Mumbai and Berkeley. Along the way, based on the work he was doing at B.I., he obtained his Ph.D. in the foundations of quantum mechanics.


He has been a visiting scholar at University of Pretoria, South Africa and Loyola University, New Orleans, USA.