A Biography.,Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman The Indian physicist

Quick Facts

ALSO KNOWN AS: - Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

NATIONALITY: - Indian    Famous Indian Men

RELIGION: - Hindu

BORN ON:-07 November 1888 AD

DIED AT AGE: - 82

SUN SIGN: - Scorpio.

BORN IN: - Tiruchirappalli, Madras Province

DIED ON: - 21 November 1970 AD

PLACE OF DEATH: - Bangalore, India

FATHER: - R. Chandrasekhara Iyer

MOTHER: -Parvati Amma

SPOUSE/PARTNER: - Lokasundari Ammal

DISCOVERIES / INVENTIONS: -Raman Effect

AWARDS: -Nobel Prize in Physics (1930)

Bharat Ratna (1954)

C.V. Raman

Abstract...Introduction.  

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, the Indian physicist who made his motherland proud by becoming the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, was a scientist par excellence. He displayed a brilliant mind even as a child and passed his matriculation examination at a much younger age as compared to other students. As the son of a lecturer in mathematics and physics, the young Raman was exposed to an academic environment from the very beginning. A topper throughout his academic days, he was deeply interested in research; in fact he began his research work on optics and acoustics even while he was a student. Even though he started his career as a Deputy Accountant General, still he could not keep away from research, often staying up whole nights to discover new things in the field of physics. He was intrigued by the blue colour of glaciers and the Mediterranean sea and wanted to unravel the mystery that why water, a colorless liquid, appeared blue to the eyes. Thus began a series of experiments on the scattering of light which ultimately led to what came to be known as the ‘Raman Effect’ for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Childhood & Early Life of C.V.Raman called “Bachpan”

He was born near a small village in Tiruchirapalli to R. Chandrasekhara Iyer and Parvathi Ammal. His father, initially a school teacher, became a lecturer in mathematics and physics in a college in Vishakhapatnam.

Raman studied in St. Aloysius Anglo-Indian High School at Vishakhapatnam. He was a brilliant student and passed his matriculation examination when he was just 11. At the age of 13 he passed his F.A. examination (equivalent to today’s intermediate examination) with a scholarship.

He joined the Presidency College in Madras in 1902 and received his B.A. in physics in 1904. He topped the exams and won a gold medal. Three years later, he earned his M.A. degree in 1907.

 Raman’s Career….throughout his life.

Though he was deeply interested in science, he appeared for the Financial Civil Service (FCS) examination at the insistence of his father. He topped the examination and went to Calcutta in 1907 to join the Indian Finance Department as Assistant Accountant General.

Still his heart was in scientific research and he began conducting research at the Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences during his free time. His job was very hectic, yet he was so dedicated towards science that he often spent nights at research.

Even though the facilities available at the association were very limited, it did not deter Raman at all who went on to publish his findings in leading international journals like ‘Nature’, ‘The Philosophical Magazine’, and ‘Physics Review’. During this time, his research was basically in the areas of vibrations and acoustics.

In 1917, he got the opportunity to join the University of Calcutta as the first Palit Professor of Physics. Raman happily resigned from his government post to take up this position though the new job paid much less than the previous one. Such was his dedication to science.

In 1919, he was made the Honorary Secretary of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, a post he held till 1933. He was very popular and many students gathered around him, attracted by his immense knowledge of science.

During the late 1920s he experimented on the scattering of light by observing the behavior of monochromatic light which penetrated transparent materials and fell on a spectrograph. This led to the discovery of what came to be known as ‘Raman Effect’ which he presented at a meeting of scientists in 1928.

He was invited by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore to become its Director. He accepted the post in 1933, becoming the first Indian to hold this post. He served as the director till 1937 though he continued as the head of the Physics Department till 1948.

In 1948 he established the Raman Research Institute (RRI) in Bangalore for conducting scientific research in different fields of physics. He continued with his research in the institute till his death.

Raman’s …Highlights of his Major Works.

He is best known for discovering the ‘Raman Effect’, or the inelastic scattering of a photon. He showed through experimentation that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This was a ground breaking discovery in early 20th century physics.

The Raman Effect

Raman and Rayleigh Scattering

Lord Rayleigh, who had believed the teenage Raman’s papers were the work of a professor, had been one of the great physicists of his day. He had won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics.

His importance to Raman’s story is that Rayleigh had been the first to explain why the sky is blue. He had then explained the sea’s color by saying it was simply a reflection of the sky’s color.

One day, in the summer of 1921, Raman was on the deck of a ship in the Mediterranean Sea en route to the Congress of Universities of the British Empire at Oxford. He looked at the beautiful blue color of the Mediterranean Sea and began to doubt Rayleigh’s explanation of its color.

Rayleigh had correctly explained that the sky looks blue because of a phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering.

Rayleigh scattering

An approximate representation of Rayleigh scattering in Earth’s atmosphere.

If Earth had no atmosphere, anyone who happened to be around in such circumstances would see a white sun and a black sky. However, this is not what we see, because sunlight interacts with the gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

Rather than coming straight to our eyes from the sun, sunlight is scattered in all directions by the atmosphere. Blue light is scattered most, meaning that it comes to our eyes from everywhere in the sky, therefore the sky looks blue. Yellow and red light are scattered least, so we usually see a yellow sun, and sometimes a red sun.

Rayleigh scattering is elastic. This means that photons of light lose no energy when they interact with gas molecules. The light, therefore, stays the same color.

Raman Discovers that the Sea Scatters Light

When he sailed back to India in September 1921 Raman, an indefatigable scientist, had with him some simple physics apparatus: a prism, a miniature spectroscope, and a diffraction grating. He used these to study the sky and the sea and concluded that the sea was scattering light.

Hence when Rayleigh said the sea’s color is simply a reflection of the sky’s color, he was not wholly correct. Raman reported his findings in a letter to the journal Nature.

When he returned to his laboratory, Raman and his students began an exhaustive program of research into light scattering.

Compton Demonstrates Inelastic Scattering

In 1923 Arthur Compton in St. Louis, USA published exciting new work showing that X-rays can lose energy when they interact with electrons. The X-rays donate some of their energy to electrons, then move on carrying less energy. In other words, Compton demonstrated that inelastic scattering is possible.

Compton received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery, which became known as the Compton effect.

The significance of the Compton effect is that in classical electrodynamics the scattering of X-rays and other electromagnetic radiation must always be elastic. Compton’s results agreed with quantum theory rather than classical theory.

The inelastic scattering discovered by Compton caused X-ray wavelengths to increase. If inelastic scattering and hence longer wavelengths were possible for visible light, then the light’s color would change.

The Raman Effect

Raman and his students continued researching light scattering in gases, liquids and solids.

They used monochromatic light – sunlight that had been filtered to leave only a single color – and found that a variety of different liquids – sixty of them – did indeed change the color of the light. They first observed this in April 1923, but very weakly.

In 1927 they found a particularly strong color change in light scattered by glycerol (then called glycerine):

Raman’s team observed the effect in gases, crystals and glass. The effect might have been mistaken for fluorescence, another phenomenon in which light has its color changed, but in Raman’s work the light scattered by liquids was polarized, which ruled out fluorescence.

What came to be known as the Raman effect – a color change accompanied by polarization – had never been seen before. The inelastic scattering at its heart was a further, very strong confirmation, of quantum theory.

The Raman effect is a very small effect compared with Rayleigh scattering. Only about 1 in ten million photons undergoes inelastic scattering.

Raman and his colleague K.S. Krishnan reported their discovery in March 1928 in Nature.

Raman was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for “work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him.”

Raman Spectroscopy

Raman showed that the energy of photons scattered inelastically serves as a ‘fingerprint’ for the substance the light is scattered from. As a result of this, Raman spectroscopy is now commonly used in chemical laboratories all over the world to identify substances. It is also used in medicine to investigate living cells and tissues – even detecting cancers – without causing harm. Laser light rather than sunlight is used as the source of photons.

The Photon’s Spin

In 1932 Raman and his student Suri Bhagavantam discovered that photons of light carry angular momentum – in quantum terms, photons possess a property called spin.

Light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation pass their angular momentum on to atoms that absorb them.

Awards & Achievements

He won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman Effect", becoming the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

He was honored with the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, in 1954 in recognition of his invaluable contributions to the field of science.

Personal Life & Legacy

He married Lokasundari Ammal in 1907 and had two sons with her—Chandrasekhar and Radhakrishnan.

He lived a long and productive life and was active till the very end. He died in 1970 at the age of 82.

Trivia

This great scientist was the paternal uncle of another excellent scientist and Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

A Biography.....The Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan is best known for his contributions in the field of mathematics, namely in number theory.

Basic Introduction.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in southern India in 1887. After demonstrating an intuitive grasp of mathematics at a young age, he began to develop his own theories and in 1911 published his first paper in India. Two years later Ramanujan began a correspondence with British mathematician G. H. Hardy that resulted in a five-year-long mentor ship for Ramanujan at Cambridge, where he published numerous papers on his work and received a B.S. for research. His early work focused on infinite series and integrals, which extended into the remainder of his career. After contracting tuberculosis, Ramanujan returned to India, where he died in 1920 at 32 years of age.

Intuition detail he did…

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode, India, a small village in the southern part of the country. Shortly after this birth, his family moved to Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a clerk in a cloth shop. Ramanujan attended the local grammar school and high school, and early on demonstrated an affinity for mathematics.

When at age 15 he obtained an out-of-date book called A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Ramanujan set about feverishly and obsessively studying its thousands of theorems before moving on to formulate many of his own. At the end of high school, the strength of his schoolwork was such that he obtained a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam.

A Blessing and a Curse

But Ramanujan’s greatest asset proved also to be his Achilles heel. He lost his scholarship to both the Government College and later at the University of Madras because his devotion to math caused him to let his other courses fall by the wayside. With little in the way of prospects, in 1909 he sought government unemployment benefits.

Yet despite these setbacks, Ramanujan continued to make strides in his mathematical work, and in 1911 published a 17-page paper on Bernoulli numbers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. Seeking the help of members of the society, in 1912 Ramanujan was able to secure a low-level post as a shipping clerk with the Madras Port Trust, where he was able to make a living while building a reputation for himself as a gifted mathematician.

Cambridge…A Stepping Stone.

Around this time, Ramanujan had become aware of the work of British mathematician G. H. Hardy — who himself had been something of a young genius — with whom he began a correspondence in 1913 and shared some of his work. After initially thinking his letters a hoax, Hardy became convinced of Ramanujan’s brilliance and was able to secure him both a research scholarship at the University of Madras as well as a grant from Cambridge.

The following year, Hardy convinced Ramanujan to come study with him at Cambridge. During their subsequent five-year mentor ship, Hardy provided the formal framework in which Ramanujan’s innate grasp of numbers could thrive, with Ramanujan publishing upwards of 20 papers on his own and more in collaboration with Hardy. Ramanujan was awarded a bachelor of sciences for research from Cambridge in 1916 and in 1918 became a member of the Royal Society of London.

Doing the Math...like magician of maths.

"[Ramanujan] made many momentous contributions to mathematics especially number theory," states George E. Andrews, an Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. "Much of his work was done jointly with his benefactor and mentor, G. H. Hardy. Together they began the powerful "circle method" to provide an exact formula for p(n), the number of integer partitions of n. (e.g. p(5)=7 where the seven partitions are 5, 4+1, 3+2, 3+1+1, 2+2+1, 2+1+1+1, 1+1+1+1+1). The circle method has played a major role in subsequent developments in analytic number theory. Ramanujan also discovered and proved that 5 always divides p(5n+4), 7 always divides p(7n+5) and 11 always divides p(11n+6). This discovery led to extensive advances in the theory of modular forms." Bruce C. Berndt, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that: "the theory of modular forms is where Ramanujan's ideas have been most influential. In the last year of his life, Ramanujan devoted much of his failing energy to a new kind of function called mock theta functions. Although after many years we can prove the claims that Ramanujan made, we are far from understanding how Ramanujan thought about them, and much work needs to be done. They also have many applications. For example, they have applications to the theory of black holes in physics."

But years of hard work, a growing sense of isolation and exposure to the cold, wet English climate soon took their toll on Ramanujan and in 1917 he contracted tuberculosis. After a brief period of recovery, his health worsened and in 1919 he returned to India.

The Man Who Knew Infinity….a movie based on Ramanujan Life.

Srinivasa Ramanujan died of his illness on April 26, 1920, at the age of 32. And even on his deathbed had been consumed by math, writing down a group of theorems that he said had come to him in a dream. These and many of his earlier theorems are so complex that the full scope of Ramanujan’s legacy has yet to be completely revealed and his work remains the focus of much mathematical research. His collected papers were published by Cambridge University Press in 1927. Of Ramanujan's published papers — 37 in total — professor Bruce C. Berndt reveals that "a huge portion of his work was left behind in three notebooks and a 'lost' notebook. These notebooks contain approximately 4000 claims, all without proofs. Most of these claims have now been proved, and like his published work, continue to inspire modern-day mathematics."

A biography of Ramanujan titled The Man Who Knew Infinity was published in 1991 and a movie of the same name starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy, premiered in September 2015 at the Toronto Film Festival.

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