Godfrey Louis

Who is Godfrey Louis?

Godfrey Louis is a controversial solid-state physicist from Kerala, known for his hypotheses about the "red rain" phenomenon in Kerala while at Mahatma Gandhi University . In April 2006, he published a paper in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesised that samples of particles from the "blood-coloured" rain that fell in his state of Kerala, India in the summer of 2001 were the result of a comet disintegrating in the upper atmosphere which comprised mainly microbes from outer space. Despite much media interest and the abundant coverage that Dr. Louis' theory received, many leading scientists like Dr. Milton Wainwright disagreed early on with Dr. Louis' hypothesis regarding the red rain's origin. An earlier study by the Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala, India, reported that the red rain was the result of spores from local algae.

Since October 2006 Dr. Louis has been at Department of Physics, Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kochi, Kerala.

In August 2010 Dr. Louis and his collaborators presented a paper in SPIE astrobiology conference held in San Diego, USA. In this paper, which is co-authored by Rajkumar Gangappa, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Milton Wainwright, A. Santhosh Kumar and Godfrey Louis, it is claimed that the red rain cells develop internal daughter cells and multiply when exposed to extreme temperature of 121 °C in an autoclave for two hours. It is further reported in the paper that the fluorescent behavior of the red cells have remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle nebula.