Can scientists make a universe from nothing

Science and Health

Zeeya Merali is a science writer and author of A Big Bang in a Little Room. She also edits the Foundational Questions Institute website, where she blogs and cohosts a physics podcast. A version of this interview originally appeared in season two of the century podcast In Search Of.Let’s start with this mind-blowing idea that scientists are trying to create a universe in a lab. What did you learn about it?
They sound like supervillains, don’t they? They’re trying to create a universe in the laboratory.
When I was working at New Scientist as a reporter, I found this paper called something like, “The Universe Out of the Monopole in a Laboratory.” Oftentimes physicists will talk in terms of metaphors. For example, there’s this massive particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where they’re trying to re-create conditions that are similar to those in our early universe. So they’ll say things like, “We’re trying to make a Big Bang,” but they don’t literally mean it.

What was weird about this paper, I realized, was that they did mean it. They literally meant it. They wanted to take a hypothetical particle called a monopole, stick it into a particle accelerator, and fire other particles at it with a whole load of energy. It’s going to take more energy than we are currently capable of, but in theory, that would trigger the particle into inflating into a whole new universe.It would create its own space and time, separate from ours but connected to ours. Looking at it from the outside, we would just see this tiny particle, which would show up like a tiny black hole spraying off other little particles, and that’s all we would know about it. Within it, it would be expanding to astronomical scales, big enough to house galaxies and stars and planets and life forms. It would be connected to our universe very briefly by a little wormhole, before that wormhole broke and we lost contact with this little baby universe entirely.This is something that could happen in a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider maybe one day in the future. This paper was like blueprints for how to do that. It blew my mind. First of all, I thought these people must be crazy. Papers are not all equally credible. Some scientists write more serious papers than others. Some are more speculative, and some are just bad. So I sat there thinking, “Is this actually a good paper? Is this just a load of nonsense?” And then I looked through the paper and the references and I suddenly understood that, actually, this is a well-established program with a long history behind it. So I decided to look into it further.There’s a lot of conversation about how the universe might emerge from “nothing.” What is “nothing”?
It’s a bit of a loaded term. I had heard this said a lot: physicists have shown that the universe can be created from nothing. I met up with Alex Vilenkin, one of the people who actually came up with this. His calculation was based on the laws of quantum theory, which tell you that empty space is never really, truly empty. So even if you create a vacuum in the lab, there’s always some uncertainty about what’s happening. For a fleeting second, you can have pairs of particles, like an electron and a positron, popping up in the vacuum. They exist for less than a nanosecond, have a little look around, and then smash back into each other and disappear. In a sense, a vacuum itself is full of these little undulations, these tiny little frothing particles that disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. That’s established. Physicists are comfortable with that.Vilenkin asked, How far can you take that? Let’s say you start with a tiny little nugget of a universe. How might it inflate into a bigger universe? Then he said, let me think about this backward and make that tiny little nugget smaller and smaller. And he ended up making it so small that it disappeared. But because it was a quantum universe with quantum rules that he was thinking about, even when it disappeared completely—there was no nugget of a universe anymore, there was no space, there was no time—there was a probability that the universe could just pop out of “nothing” and then start to grow. That’s what people usually refer to when they say that physics has shown that you can have a universe created from nothing.

But what does “nothing” mean here? I understand you’ve got no space, no time, no matter. But Vilenkin is saying that the quantum laws of physics still apply. There are these abstract laws, this handbook of how matter and time and space should behave should they ever pop into existence. Vilenkin said yes, that’s right: these rules are still there. He said that he put “nothing” in quotes when he wrote his paper because it’s not really nothing.I don’t know if that’s convincing to you or not. To me, it’s weird to think about why there would be one certain rule book that exists for the potential of applying to something that may pop into existence one day. Vilenkin had an answer, which maybe was just as equally perplexing. He said, well, when you think about it, it’s weird that these physical laws would apply to nothing, but at the same time, it’s kind of weird that these physical laws apply to anything, even when there’s something in the universe. Why do they do that? Nobody knows.One scientist that you interviewed identifies a field of consciousness in the inner life that he says is something like photons and electromagnetic fields, and he doesn’t just mean this metaphorically. What do you make of that?Theoretical physicist Abhay Ashtekar is famous for having worked on an idea for how space-time itself is generated. So we talked about how the universe can come from nothing. He wanted to get an answer to how to actually go from nothing and then stitch together the space and time that we have around us.Before I interviewed him, somebody told me I should ask him about his experience meditating, because he has a very serious dedication to meditation. That’s not hugely common among physicists—or perhaps it would be better to say, it’s not hugely common for physicists to feel comfortable talking about that.Let me tell you a bit about the physics first, because you’d asked about how the physics connects to his inner life. Quantum fields are very well understood. We talk about, for instance, light being made up of photons or little particles, and we talk about an electromagnetic field that these photons come out of. You’ve got some soup on the stove and you turn up the heat and suddenly it gets so vigorous and you can see a kind of roiling surface. And those bubbling excitations would end up acting like little particles of light.So you’ve got this kind of field and then you’ve got these bubbling things coming out of it. It’s very similar to what we were talking about with the vacuum and things bubbling out of the vacuum. It’s very natural for physicists to think about fields, or nothing that pervades everything and things popping out of it.Then you have Ashtekar’s more speculative ideas in physics. Let’s say you have nothing. Again, this is one of these sneaky things where physicists will say “nothing,” but then they’ll say, “but there are certain rules that apply.” And for Ashtekar, there’s this sense of geometry that applies. Because you have a sense of geometry, you can have loops of geometry that can suddenly pop out of this empty field of nothing. These loops that jump out of nothing can somehow link together to create space-time, like they’re these building blocks of space and time.

So we’ve already gone from something that’s very well established in physics to something that’s very speculative, which is how space and time could be created. It’s an interesting idea that’s been around for many decades now, and quite a few physicists like it and are investigating it.And then we get into something which is even more speculative than that: I started to ask Ashtekar about his meditative experiences. Being a physicist, he thought about what was happening in very physical terms. He was taking ideas from Eastern philosophy, in which there is a universal entity that we are all part of, in which the individual is part of a greater whole. As he was picturing it, you have a field like the electromagnetic field that pervades the whole universe, but now this is a field of consciousness, of one shared consciousness, and each of our consciousnesses is an excitation out of that field.It’s funny because for physicists it’s easier to think in terms of the physics and talk about consciousness by analogy, whereas I think everybody else is probably like, “Why are you telling me about the electromagnetic field?” I think it’s something that anybody who has tried meditating or mindfulness or something like that has probably experienced, which is that if you can quieten your mind, you can sink back into what he described as this “consciousness field.” For some Eastern philosophies, it’s this sense of actually sinking back into the shared consciousness that we all are part of.I thought that was an absolutely beautiful analogy. And so I said to Ashtekar, This is a lovely way of thinking about it, but you don’t literally mean that there is a field of consciousness. And he was like, No, I absolutely do. He’s a serious physicist. And he was saying, Well, I think that we could one day discover this consciousness field.Ashtekar hasn’t worked out the mathematics of it yet, but Einstein posited space-time pervading the universe more than a hundred years ago, and it took a hundred years for experiments to detect ripples in that fabric of space-time. So just because it takes a very long time for people to work out how to actually find the physical proof of this, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there.Ashtekar meant all of that very literally. Meditating certainly has a real, physical effect, so it’s not so outlandish that he should think about it in very serious scientific terms and in terms of something that he’s used to handling mathematically. I’ve never heard anybody else try to do that. Again, because people who are looking into these questions, cosmologists and physicists, are so used to thinking on these scales, it doesn’t seem weird to them to say, “Well, if I can think of an electromagnetic field that is pervading all of space, why can’t I think of a consciousness field doing the same thing?”  
 

Can scientists make a universe from nothing

Science and Health

Zeeya Merali is a science writer and author of A Big Bang in a Little Room. She also edits the Foundational Questions Institute website, where she blogs and cohosts a physics podcast. A version of this interview originally appeared in season two of the century podcast In Search Of.Let’s start with this mind-blowing idea that scientists are trying to create a universe in a lab. What did you learn about it?
They sound like supervillains, don’t they? They’re trying to create a universe in the laboratory.
When I was working at New Scientist as a reporter, I found this paper called something like, “The Universe Out of the Monopole in a Laboratory.” Oftentimes physicists will talk in terms of metaphors. For example, there’s this massive particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where they’re trying to re-create conditions that are similar to those in our early universe. So they’ll say things like, “We’re trying to make a Big Bang,” but they don’t literally mean it.

What was weird about this paper, I realized, was that they did mean it. They literally meant it. They wanted to take a hypothetical particle called a monopole, stick it into a particle accelerator, and fire other particles at it with a whole load of energy. It’s going to take more energy than we are currently capable of, but in theory, that would trigger the particle into inflating into a whole new universe.It would create its own space and time, separate from ours but connected to ours. Looking at it from the outside, we would just see this tiny particle, which would show up like a tiny black hole spraying off other little particles, and that’s all we would know about it. Within it, it would be expanding to astronomical scales, big enough to house galaxies and stars and planets and life forms. It would be connected to our universe very briefly by a little wormhole, before that wormhole broke and we lost contact with this little baby universe entirely.This is something that could happen in a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider maybe one day in the future. This paper was like blueprints for how to do that. It blew my mind. First of all, I thought these people must be crazy. Papers are not all equally credible. Some scientists write more serious papers than others. Some are more speculative, and some are just bad. So I sat there thinking, “Is this actually a good paper? Is this just a load of nonsense?” And then I looked through the paper and the references and I suddenly understood that, actually, this is a well-established program with a long history behind it. So I decided to look into it further.There’s a lot of conversation about how the universe might emerge from “nothing.” What is “nothing”?
It’s a bit of a loaded term. I had heard this said a lot: physicists have shown that the universe can be created from nothing. I met up with Alex Vilenkin, one of the people who actually came up with this. His calculation was based on the laws of quantum theory, which tell you that empty space is never really, truly empty. So even if you create a vacuum in the lab, there’s always some uncertainty about what’s happening. For a fleeting second, you can have pairs of particles, like an electron and a positron, popping up in the vacuum. They exist for less than a nanosecond, have a little look around, and then smash back into each other and disappear. In a sense, a vacuum itself is full of these little undulations, these tiny little frothing particles that disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. That’s established. Physicists are comfortable with that.Vilenkin asked, How far can you take that? Let’s say you start with a tiny little nugget of a universe. How might it inflate into a bigger universe? Then he said, let me think about this backward and make that tiny little nugget smaller and smaller. And he ended up making it so small that it disappeared. But because it was a quantum universe with quantum rules that he was thinking about, even when it disappeared completely—there was no nugget of a universe anymore, there was no space, there was no time—there was a probability that the universe could just pop out of “nothing” and then start to grow. That’s what people usually refer to when they say that physics has shown that you can have a universe created from nothing.

But what does “nothing” mean here? I understand you’ve got no space, no time, no matter. But Vilenkin is saying that the quantum laws of physics still apply. There are these abstract laws, this handbook of how matter and time and space should behave should they ever pop into existence. Vilenkin said yes, that’s right: these rules are still there. He said that he put “nothing” in quotes when he wrote his paper because it’s not really nothing.I don’t know if that’s convincing to you or not. To me, it’s weird to think about why there would be one certain rule book that exists for the potential of applying to something that may pop into existence one day. Vilenkin had an answer, which maybe was just as equally perplexing. He said, well, when you think about it, it’s weird that these physical laws would apply to nothing, but at the same time, it’s kind of weird that these physical laws apply to anything, even when there’s something in the universe. Why do they do that? Nobody knows.One scientist that you interviewed identifies a field of consciousness in the inner life that he says is something like photons and electromagnetic fields, and he doesn’t just mean this metaphorically. What do you make of that?Theoretical physicist Abhay Ashtekar is famous for having worked on an idea for how space-time itself is generated. So we talked about how the universe can come from nothing. He wanted to get an answer to how to actually go from nothing and then stitch together the space and time that we have around us.Before I interviewed him, somebody told me I should ask him about his experience meditating, because he has a very serious dedication to meditation. That’s not hugely common among physicists—or perhaps it would be better to say, it’s not hugely common for physicists to feel comfortable talking about that.Let me tell you a bit about the physics first, because you’d asked about how the physics connects to his inner life. Quantum fields are very well understood. We talk about, for instance, light being made up of photons or little particles, and we talk about an electromagnetic field that these photons come out of. You’ve got some soup on the stove and you turn up the heat and suddenly it gets so vigorous and you can see a kind of roiling surface. And those bubbling excitations would end up acting like little particles of light.So you’ve got this kind of field and then you’ve got these bubbling things coming out of it. It’s very similar to what we were talking about with the vacuum and things bubbling out of the vacuum. It’s very natural for physicists to think about fields, or nothing that pervades everything and things popping out of it.Then you have Ashtekar’s more speculative ideas in physics. Let’s say you have nothing. Again, this is one of these sneaky things where physicists will say “nothing,” but then they’ll say, “but there are certain rules that apply.” And for Ashtekar, there’s this sense of geometry that applies. Because you have a sense of geometry, you can have loops of geometry that can suddenly pop out of this empty field of nothing. These loops that jump out of nothing can somehow link together to create space-time, like they’re these building blocks of space and time.

So we’ve already gone from something that’s very well established in physics to something that’s very speculative, which is how space and time could be created. It’s an interesting idea that’s been around for many decades now, and quite a few physicists like it and are investigating it.And then we get into something which is even more speculative than that: I started to ask Ashtekar about his meditative experiences. Being a physicist, he thought about what was happening in very physical terms. He was taking ideas from Eastern philosophy, in which there is a universal entity that we are all part of, in which the individual is part of a greater whole. As he was picturing it, you have a field like the electromagnetic field that pervades the whole universe, but now this is a field of consciousness, of one shared consciousness, and each of our consciousnesses is an excitation out of that field.It’s funny because for physicists it’s easier to think in terms of the physics and talk about consciousness by analogy, whereas I think everybody else is probably like, “Why are you telling me about the electromagnetic field?” I think it’s something that anybody who has tried meditating or mindfulness or something like that has probably experienced, which is that if you can quieten your mind, you can sink back into what he described as this “consciousness field.” For some Eastern philosophies, it’s this sense of actually sinking back into the shared consciousness that we all are part of.I thought that was an absolutely beautiful analogy. And so I said to Ashtekar, This is a lovely way of thinking about it, but you don’t literally mean that there is a field of consciousness. And he was like, No, I absolutely do. He’s a serious physicist. And he was saying, Well, I think that we could one day discover this consciousness field.Ashtekar hasn’t worked out the mathematics of it yet, but Einstein posited space-time pervading the universe more than a hundred years ago, and it took a hundred years for experiments to detect ripples in that fabric of space-time. So just because it takes a very long time for people to work out how to actually find the physical proof of this, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there.Ashtekar meant all of that very literally. Meditating certainly has a real, physical effect, so it’s not so outlandish that he should think about it in very serious scientific terms and in terms of something that he’s used to handling mathematically. I’ve never heard anybody else try to do that. Again, because people who are looking into these questions, cosmologists and physicists, are so used to thinking on these scales, it doesn’t seem weird to them to say, “Well, if I can think of an electromagnetic field that is pervading all of space, why can’t I think of a consciousness field doing the same thing?”  
 

Vorokhta, Urych included in list of best tourist villages according to UN Tourism 2024

Travel

13:58
15.11.2024

Two villages from Ukraine for the first time entered the list of 55 best tourist villages in the world in 2024 according to the global initiative of UN Tourism, the press service of the State Agency for Tourism Development of Ukraine reports.

Head of the Tourism Agency Maryana Oleskiv noted that the inclusion of Ukrainian villages in this list opens up positive prospects for the nominees. “Urych and Vorokhta will not only receive mentoring from UN Tourism and potential financial support from foreign donors, but will also attract attention to their cultural, natural and gastronomic riches of both Ukrainian and foreign travelers,” the head of the agency emphasized.

As reported, in early May 2024, the Ukrainian Tourism Agency sent a package of documents from five Ukrainian villages – Vorokhta, Zelena Roscha, Kvasy, Olyka and Urych – to UN Tourism. The applications of Ukrainian contestants were selected by representatives of the Advisory Council from more than 260 participants from more than 60 countries. The winners were announced at the 122nd session of the Executive Council of the United Nations Tourism Organization, which was held in Cartagena (Colombia). Official awards for Urych and Vorokhta will be brought to Ukraine from Colombia by representatives of UN Tourism – Director of External Relations Beka Jakeli and Director of the European Region Cordula Wohlmuter. The winners will be awarded on November 28 at the third National Tourism Summit in Lviv.

UN Tourism launched the global initiative The Best Tourism Villages in 2021.

Centre County tourism bureau awarded more than $93K

Travel

STATE COLLEGE — State Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Centre, Wednesday announced a grant of more than $93,000 to the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau to support the bureau’s investment in the 2024 Ironman 70.3 Triathlon Series.Conklin said the grant, secured through the Department of Community and Economic Development’s Sports Marketing and Tourism Program, would help ensure Center County’s tourism bureau has the resources to continue its successful promotional efforts.

Optimism on Afton: Tech exec buys Swannanoa Golf and Country Club

Technology

Andy Florance really likes Afton Mountain.For eight years, the founder and CEO of real estate data company CoStar Group — which counts apartments.com and homes.com among its properties — has been restoring a century-old hunting lodge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. And in late July, Florance acquired the recently shuttered mountaintop golf course, the Swannanoa Golf and Country Club, a high-profile property he hopes to preserve.

“There were a number of developers looking at building as many housing units as they possibly could on that golf course, and I didn’t think that was the right thing to happen,” the Washington, D.C., native told The Daily Progress. “And so I purchased it.”The family of late course founder Randolph “Pete” Lang Sr. listed the property for sale last year, and for the first time in nearly 50 years, the public course did not open in the spring. Augusta County land records show that one of Florance’s companies took title of the 241-acre tract on July 29 for the asking price of $3.5 million. 

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A sign blocks the entrance to what was once the Swannanoa Golf and Country Club, Sunday, June 2, 2024, on Afton Mountain.

CAL TOBIAS, THE DAILY PROGRESS

“We’re doing a study period and analyzing the feasibility of restoring it back to what it was,” said Florance. “In the meantime, we just cleaned it up and fixed it up.”Anyone passing by the closed links off Howardsville Turnpike can already see some fresh asphalt, mowed grass and a pile of dead and dying trees recently felled and gathered. Florance said he also took down some abandoned outbuildings.Florance’s affection for Afton was evident in 2017 when he bought Elk Mountain, a low-slung, stone lodge built in 1929 by Thomas Fortune Ryan, the turn-of-the-century financier who commissioned the better known Nelson County showplace Oak Ridge. Now in his eighth year of restoring Elk Mountain, Florance said he found it on one of CoStar’s own sites, land.com.”At the time, I was working on virtual reality headsets for looking at properties, and I put the headset on, and I looked at the view up there on the mountain. I thought, ‘This is the most beautiful place I’ve seen,'” he said. “And sure enough, it is.”

Florance

Florance said that he restored every historical detail in the former hunting lodge, including the taxidermy elk busts that conveyed as part of the deal. And now that he has made a home out of it, he said he’s eager to improve other parts of the neighborhood.Like many others, Florance doesn’t like what he has seen nearby at exit 99 on Interstate 64. There, bisected by U.S. Route 250, the Blue Ridge Parkway meets Skyline Drive. And there, the ruins of a former Holiday Inn loom over the shells of burned-out cabins and a long-shuttered Howard Johnson’s, whose trademark orange roof now barely peeks through vines. “What a shame it is,” said Florance. “It’s been allowed to fester and become a place where criminal activity occurs for decades now.”However, the days of arson and drug-addled squatters may soon be ending, as Florance isn’t the only new face on the mountain. After the 2023 death of James “Phil” Dulaney, who held the controlling interest on the moldering commercial village, Dulaney’s heirs took over. One of them, by virtue of marriage, is William Hurd, a Richmond-based lawyer with a track record of wins at both the U.S. and the Virginia Supreme Court.”We are in active discussions with potential developers,” Hurd told The Daily Progress. “We are optimistic that we will get things moving fairly quickly.”In protecting what Hurd calls “the lower mountain,” Florance said he’d be willing to participate.”I’d be open to the opportunity should it arise,” Florance said. “I have a vested interest in trying to keep that area safe and clean and productive.”

The trademark orange roof of a former Howard Johnson’s is seen on Sunday, June 2, 2024, on Afton Mountain. 

CAL TOBIAS, THE DAILY PROGRESS

Informed that Hurd hoped to soon obtain business partners, Florance emphasized his interest.”Feel free to give him my phone number,” said Florance.When it comes to to Swannanoa — the opulent but crumbling 112-year-old, Italian Renaissance revival villa in the neighborhood, from which Florance’s new golf course takes its name — the executive is less eager.”I just restored something, so it’s not really in my wheelhouse, and it’s a big project,” said Florance, who estimates that Swannanoa would cost about $100 million in today’s money to build.

Swannanoa, the Italian Renaissance revival villa built in 1912 by Richmond industrialist James Dooley on the border of Nelson and Augusta counties, is seen on Sunday, June 23, 2024.

CAL TOBIAS, THE DAILY PROGRESS

With CoStar, the firm he founded in his Princeton University dormitory, now a publicly traded international business valued at $31 billion, the 61-year-old Florance could presumably live anywhere. But as he told the Wall Street Journal this past July, after the sale of his $28.5 million house on Florida’s Gulf Coast he has been eager to return to his mid-Atlantic roots.Florance is the son of the late Coke Florance, a renowned Washington, D.C., architect responsible for the Capital One Arena and the visitor center at the National Cathedral. The younger Florance had a privileged but troubled childhood that at one point left him homeless on the streets of Richmond. Today, a CoStar office tower looms large over that same city.Although he is a native of Washington and his company remains headquartered there, Florance has been turning his eye to neighboring Virginia more and more.In 2021, Florance bought a James River-fronting condominium in Richmond, announced a half-billion-dollar expansion of CoStar’s footprint in the city and opened a CoStar office in Charlottesville. 

Richmond’s skyline will look a bit different in 2025 when CoStar Group’s campus downtown will include its new 26-story office tower and a five-story multipurpose building. The front of its current facility is just visible behind the multipurpose building in this rendering.

COSTAR GROUP

CoStar recently offered $18 million to Virginia Commonwealth University to create a 213,000-square-foot complex to place VCU’s innovation programs and its celebrated School of the Arts under one roof. That project is slated to open in early 2027.And on Nov. 1 of this year, Florance announced that CoStar would move its Washington headquarters across the Potomac River to Arlington.While several Afton Mountain neighbors expressed gratitude for Florance’s interest in his Virginia home, the man himself cautions that water availability will determine whether he can bring back golfing at Swannanoa. He said he hopes to get his answer about the future of the golf course in about a year.”Yay,” said neighbor Ann Etchison when told of Florance’s quest. “Most of us living up here would be pretty happy if it remained a golf course, and my husband and I would be inaugural members.”
Hawes Spencer (434) [email protected]@HawesSpencer on X

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Can Elon Musk ever run for president of the United States?

Technology

Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreDonald Trump has wasted no time in assembling his administration for his second term in the White House after his historic US election victory last week. Among the confirmed picks is Elon Musk, controversial tech mogul and businessman who played a key role in Mr Trump’s presidential campaign.He has been appointed co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. According to Mr Trump, the non-departmental advisory group will “pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.Elon Musk shakes Donald Trump’s hand. Trump recently joked he ‘can’t get rid of’ the billionaire

Can Elon Musk ever run for president of the United States?

Technology

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Why is France eyeing India’s Pinaka launch rocket tech? Its cost & efficiency are tempting

Technology

France’s interest in India’s indigenous Pinaka Multiple Launch Rocket System has stirred significant attention recently. While this might have surprised many observers, those closely monitoring the French defence landscape know that this interest began as early as 2022, largely in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The defence collaboration between India and France has long been established, and France, already a major arms supplier to India, has worked to further enhance this relationship.
Though many details remain classified, the 2023 India-France defence industrial roadmap signifies this ambition. High-level diplomatic exchanges have further solidified this cooperation, signalling that the collaboration now encompasses more than just exports to India or joint development of French weaponry. It’s also opening doors for New Delhi to supply indigenously made defence systems directly to Paris.
This mutual trust has laid a strong foundation for France to emerge as the second largest defence supplier to India – accounting for over 30 per cent of India’s imports. Additionally, Paris is also one of the largest buyers of Indian defence electronic equipment after the United States. Given India’s battle-tested, advanced, and cost-effective systems like the Pinaka MLRS, France’s interest in diversifying its defence capabilities by evaluating Indian systems comes as little surprise.

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Pressures of the Russia-Ukraine war
France’s initial calls for advanced rocket artillery systems came from its Army Chief of Staff, General Pierre Schill, who highlighted the need before the Parliamentary Defence Committee in November 2023. As a follow-up, the French government announced plans to modernise its military arsenal with new, long-range MLRS by May 2024.For many Western militaries, including France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, the earlier generations of rocket artillery were based on the US-designed High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), which entered service in the 1990s and offered a strike range of 15 to 80 km. These systems became integral to France’s first artillery regiment, with Paris using the LRU (Lance-Roquettes Unitaire) version of the HIMARS.To meet rising demands for artillery and military modernisation in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, President Emmanuel Macron’s administration introduced the Military Programming Law (2024-2030), allocating €600 million for procuring 13 long-range artillery systems by 2030, with another 13 units to be acquired by 2035.
The French defence procurement agency, the Directorate General of Armaments (DGA), has since been carefully reviewing artillery systems from around the world. It’s paying close attention to HIMARS’ performance in Ukraine, and Pinaka’s role in Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.To replenish artillery supplies, France had transferred six of its LRUs to Ukraine so far, reducing its stockpile significantly, especially given that only about 15 units were modernised post-Cold War. Now, with only nine LRUs remaining, France’s rocket artillery capabilities are considerably limited.In his 2023 presentation to the defence committee, General Schill specified that France requires an MLRS with modular capabilities, capable of firing a range of missiles with varying ranges—from 120-150 km and even up to 500 km. With the Military Programming Law in effect, France has the legislative and financial framework to proceed with procuring these capabilities.
Also read: Bought by Armenia, being studied by France, Pinaka rocket system becomes more powerful
France’s options: domestic and international
For now, France’s top choice remains domestically developed systems. Two alliances are competing for the French contract: one between French jet engine maker Safran and European missile manufacturer MBDA, and another between advanced tech company Thales and aerospace company ArianeGroup. However, since France’s tender is open to international bids, American aerospace and defence company Lockheed Martin is expected to propose its long-range HIMARS system.
Yet, the high cost of HIMARS has prompted France to consider alternatives. The August 2024 sale of 22 HIMARS units to Australia was valued at nearly $1 billion, which could be prohibitively expensive for French budgets. This makes the Indian-designed Pinaka MLRS, known for its high performance and cost-effectiveness, an attractive option. The Pinaka Mark III, currently under development, is tailored to meet many of France’s specifications, presenting itself as a viable solution.
Also read: Is Five Eyes destabilising India’s rise as non-white power? Idea is as old as Cold War era
From Pinaka Mark 1 to Mark 3
The Pinaka MLRS, developed by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), is fully indigenous and first drew international attention with Armenia’s 2023 purchase. Armenia has relied on the Pinaka in its conflict with Azerbaijan, further strengthening India’s position as Armenia’s top defence supplier. France, as Armenia’s second-largest arms supplier, has been observing Pinaka’s performance in the Caucasus closely, offering Paris firsthand insights into New Delhi’s defence technology capabilities.The origins of the Pinaka system date back to the late 1980s, when the Indian Army needed a modern artillery system to replace the ageing Russian BM-21 Grad system. The Kargil War of 1999 underscored this need, pushing the Indian Army to seek a system capable of accurately targeting enemy positions from a considerable distance. DRDO had already initiated the Pinaka project in 1986, and by the late 1990s, the first-generation Pinaka Mark I, with a range of 40 km, was ready for deployment. Since then, the system has gained a reputation for its reliability, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness, making it a staple in Indian military operations.Today, the Pinaka has evolved into the Pinaka Mark II, which has a range of up to 60-75 kilometres. Work is also underway on extended-range variants that can potentially reach 90 kilometres or more. A single Pinaka battery, consisting of six launch vehicles, can fire a salvo of 72 rockets in just 44 seconds, covering an area of approximately 1,000 by 800 meters. This makes it highly effective against large formations and entrenched enemy targets.
In addition to its firepower, the Pinaka system features an advanced command and control setup, providing high accuracy—over 90 per cent with single firing and up to 99.99 per cent with dual firing. Its flexibility to launch a range of warheads, from high-explosive fragmentation to anti-personnel and anti-tank munitions, makes it versatile for various mission requirements.
Also Read: As Army looks for tracked air defence system, Russian Pantsir comes knocking
The future of Pinaka: potential for Western markets
India is now developing even longer-range Pinaka models, including the Pinaka Mark III, which can hit targets as far as 120 km and potentially up to 300 km. In 2021, the Indian Army tasked DRDO with creating a version capable of matching Chinese multiple-barrel rocket systems with ranges close to 300 km along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).The new variants of Pinaka are expected to incorporate advanced propulsion systems, possibly using hybrid technologies and updated fuel compositions to extend range without sacrificing accuracy. Enhanced guidance systems with satellite navigation, and eventually AI-enabled capabilities, are also likely, making the Pinaka Mark III an increasingly attractive option.With its 300 km range, the Pinaka III is particularly appealing for Western partners looking to build up their aerial artillery capabilities. Its cost-effectiveness and robust performance position Pinaka as a competitive option, especially for countries with budget constraints. As seen with Armenia’s adoption and France’s increasing curiosity about it, the system’s battle-proven versatility and advanced capabilities resonate well beyond India’s borders. This signals its potential for future collaborations and sales in Western defence markets, particlularly Paris.
Pinaka’s French affair is here to stay.The writer is a geopolitics analyst and author. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)

Why is France eyeing India’s Pinaka launch rocket tech? Its cost & efficiency are tempting

Technology

France’s interest in India’s indigenous Pinaka Multiple Launch Rocket System has stirred significant attention recently. While this might have surprised many observers, those closely monitoring the French defence landscape know that this interest began as early as 2022, largely in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The defence collaboration between India and France has long been established, and France, already a major arms supplier to India, has worked to further enhance this relationship.
Though many details remain classified, the 2023 India-France defence industrial roadmap signifies this ambition. High-level diplomatic exchanges have further solidified this cooperation, signalling that the collaboration now encompasses more than just exports to India or joint development of French weaponry. It’s also opening doors for New Delhi to supply indigenously made defence systems directly to Paris.
This mutual trust has laid a strong foundation for France to emerge as the second largest defence supplier to India – accounting for over 30 per cent of India’s imports. Additionally, Paris is also one of the largest buyers of Indian defence electronic equipment after the United States. Given India’s battle-tested, advanced, and cost-effective systems like the Pinaka MLRS, France’s interest in diversifying its defence capabilities by evaluating Indian systems comes as little surprise.

Show Full Article

Pressures of the Russia-Ukraine war
France’s initial calls for advanced rocket artillery systems came from its Army Chief of Staff, General Pierre Schill, who highlighted the need before the Parliamentary Defence Committee in November 2023. As a follow-up, the French government announced plans to modernise its military arsenal with new, long-range MLRS by May 2024.For many Western militaries, including France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, the earlier generations of rocket artillery were based on the US-designed High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), which entered service in the 1990s and offered a strike range of 15 to 80 km. These systems became integral to France’s first artillery regiment, with Paris using the LRU (Lance-Roquettes Unitaire) version of the HIMARS.To meet rising demands for artillery and military modernisation in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, President Emmanuel Macron’s administration introduced the Military Programming Law (2024-2030), allocating €600 million for procuring 13 long-range artillery systems by 2030, with another 13 units to be acquired by 2035.
The French defence procurement agency, the Directorate General of Armaments (DGA), has since been carefully reviewing artillery systems from around the world. It’s paying close attention to HIMARS’ performance in Ukraine, and Pinaka’s role in Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.To replenish artillery supplies, France had transferred six of its LRUs to Ukraine so far, reducing its stockpile significantly, especially given that only about 15 units were modernised post-Cold War. Now, with only nine LRUs remaining, France’s rocket artillery capabilities are considerably limited.In his 2023 presentation to the defence committee, General Schill specified that France requires an MLRS with modular capabilities, capable of firing a range of missiles with varying ranges—from 120-150 km and even up to 500 km. With the Military Programming Law in effect, France has the legislative and financial framework to proceed with procuring these capabilities.
Also read: Bought by Armenia, being studied by France, Pinaka rocket system becomes more powerful
France’s options: domestic and international
For now, France’s top choice remains domestically developed systems. Two alliances are competing for the French contract: one between French jet engine maker Safran and European missile manufacturer MBDA, and another between advanced tech company Thales and aerospace company ArianeGroup. However, since France’s tender is open to international bids, American aerospace and defence company Lockheed Martin is expected to propose its long-range HIMARS system.
Yet, the high cost of HIMARS has prompted France to consider alternatives. The August 2024 sale of 22 HIMARS units to Australia was valued at nearly $1 billion, which could be prohibitively expensive for French budgets. This makes the Indian-designed Pinaka MLRS, known for its high performance and cost-effectiveness, an attractive option. The Pinaka Mark III, currently under development, is tailored to meet many of France’s specifications, presenting itself as a viable solution.
Also read: Is Five Eyes destabilising India’s rise as non-white power? Idea is as old as Cold War era
From Pinaka Mark 1 to Mark 3
The Pinaka MLRS, developed by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), is fully indigenous and first drew international attention with Armenia’s 2023 purchase. Armenia has relied on the Pinaka in its conflict with Azerbaijan, further strengthening India’s position as Armenia’s top defence supplier. France, as Armenia’s second-largest arms supplier, has been observing Pinaka’s performance in the Caucasus closely, offering Paris firsthand insights into New Delhi’s defence technology capabilities.The origins of the Pinaka system date back to the late 1980s, when the Indian Army needed a modern artillery system to replace the ageing Russian BM-21 Grad system. The Kargil War of 1999 underscored this need, pushing the Indian Army to seek a system capable of accurately targeting enemy positions from a considerable distance. DRDO had already initiated the Pinaka project in 1986, and by the late 1990s, the first-generation Pinaka Mark I, with a range of 40 km, was ready for deployment. Since then, the system has gained a reputation for its reliability, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness, making it a staple in Indian military operations.Today, the Pinaka has evolved into the Pinaka Mark II, which has a range of up to 60-75 kilometres. Work is also underway on extended-range variants that can potentially reach 90 kilometres or more. A single Pinaka battery, consisting of six launch vehicles, can fire a salvo of 72 rockets in just 44 seconds, covering an area of approximately 1,000 by 800 meters. This makes it highly effective against large formations and entrenched enemy targets.
In addition to its firepower, the Pinaka system features an advanced command and control setup, providing high accuracy—over 90 per cent with single firing and up to 99.99 per cent with dual firing. Its flexibility to launch a range of warheads, from high-explosive fragmentation to anti-personnel and anti-tank munitions, makes it versatile for various mission requirements.
Also Read: As Army looks for tracked air defence system, Russian Pantsir comes knocking
The future of Pinaka: potential for Western markets
India is now developing even longer-range Pinaka models, including the Pinaka Mark III, which can hit targets as far as 120 km and potentially up to 300 km. In 2021, the Indian Army tasked DRDO with creating a version capable of matching Chinese multiple-barrel rocket systems with ranges close to 300 km along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).The new variants of Pinaka are expected to incorporate advanced propulsion systems, possibly using hybrid technologies and updated fuel compositions to extend range without sacrificing accuracy. Enhanced guidance systems with satellite navigation, and eventually AI-enabled capabilities, are also likely, making the Pinaka Mark III an increasingly attractive option.With its 300 km range, the Pinaka III is particularly appealing for Western partners looking to build up their aerial artillery capabilities. Its cost-effectiveness and robust performance position Pinaka as a competitive option, especially for countries with budget constraints. As seen with Armenia’s adoption and France’s increasing curiosity about it, the system’s battle-proven versatility and advanced capabilities resonate well beyond India’s borders. This signals its potential for future collaborations and sales in Western defence markets, particlularly Paris.
Pinaka’s French affair is here to stay.The writer is a geopolitics analyst and author. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)