I had to start from basic formulae and derive things myself.īut time is something you have plenty of in prison. Of course, it took much longer than it would have done if I had been at my computer. I worked up the research ideas I had already in my head before my arrest.

One of my students Google-translated some research papers for me into Turkish, but they were held back on suspicion that they included secret codes - presumably because they contained so many equations. Nothing in a foreign language was allowed in the jail. Nothing digital - not even a pocket calculator - was allowed.

What access did you have to research materials while in the prison? Nature interviewed Kaya by Skype about his experiences. I am also indebted to the colleagues who show support in these difficult times.” Each contains a footnote that he dedicates to his friends in jail “who made my stay bearable at hell for 440 days between and. After his release, he posted the papers on the preprint server arXiv.

He wrote three research papers during his incarceration, on topics including inflation theory and cosmological perturbation theory. Kaya says that while in prison, he kept his sanity by continuing his work on fundamental topics in cosmology. In the meantime, he has been suspended from his academic post, and he has yet to learn whether his university, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, plans to fire him or to await the outcome of the appeal. Kaya says that he is innocent and is appealing against the verdict.

On 20 December, a court declared him guilty of being a member of a terrorist organization and sentenced him to six years of imprisonment - but released him early owing to the time he had already served in prison while awaiting trial. He was arrested three months after the failed coup and held for more than a year before his trial took place. Theoretical physicist Ali Kaya is one of them. Thousands of academics in Turkish universities stand accused of either having supported terrorism or the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016. Academics lay down their gowns during a protest against the dismissal of academics from universities following a post-coup emergency decree at Ankara University in Turkey, February 2017.

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