A Glimpse At The Scientific Life Of Sir C V Raman

Feeling Physics has completed it's one year on 28 July. And to celebrate this let's have a look at the scientific life of Sir C V Raman. This article is an extract from the 'C V Raman, A Biography' by Uma Parameswaran.

Look at the resplendent colours on the soap bubbles!

Why is the sea blue?

What makes diamonds glitter?

Ask the right questions, and nature will open the doors to her secrets.

‘I have panted a papaya tree today. I will not be here when it bears fruit, but there will be others to enjoy them.'

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman ( 1888-1970) responded to beauty in nature and in the art with all his senses.  He was all times a scientist, breathing and living science throughout his life, giving all he had- material, intellectual, and spiritual – to the cause of science. He made the Indian Association of Science in Calcutta everything that its founder, Mahendralal Sircar, had dreamt it would be.  At the Indian Academy of Sciences that he founded in Bangalore, he continued to shape as per his own vision space where scientists could pursue their research without bureaucratic interference, where journals would publish research results expeditiously and where the physical environment was set against nature's unfailing beauty. The truest part of education, he maintained, was to cultivate ‘a love of the beauty’.

He often spoke about the links between art, aesthetics and science. The man of science, he once said, ‘seeks to resolve her (nature’s) infinite complexities into simple principles or elements of action which he calls the laws of nature. In doing this, the man of science, like the exponents of other forms of art, subjects himself to a rigorous discipline, the rules of which he had laid down for himself and which he calls logic….science…is a fusion of man’s aesthetic and intellectual functions devoted to the representations of nature. It is, therefore, the highest form of creative art’.

 Raman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his observation of a phenomenon of light scattering, which was to be one of the most convincing proofs of the quantum theory. It was the culmination of seven years of work. During his sea voyage to England in 1921, he had wondered about the blueness of the Mediterranean sea. Unable to accept Lord Rayleigh’s explanation that the colour was just the reflection of the colour of the sky, Raman speculated that it was the result of the scattering of sunlight by water molecules. He published his speculation right away but it was another seven years before he could experimentally prove the details of the phenomenon. The Raman Effect discovered in Fabruary 1928.

His scientific work was in Physics, in the field of acoustics, optics and light scattering, ultrasonics and crystallography, vibrations of the crystal lattice in diamonds and other gems, optics of minerals and the physiology of vision. Even a cursory look at these and other subjects reveals his love of everyday wonders: the soap bubbles, the intricacies of musical instruments, the facets of gems and  diamonda na dthe marvels of vision and sound and so on .

Raman made his major discovery in February 1928 at the laboratories of the Indian Association For the Cultivation of Science. The Raman Effect is the inelasctic stacrring of a photon . it questioned  the phenomema known as Rayleigh Scattring . Which states that when the light is scattered from a molecule most are scattered elastically an that they have the same frequency and hence wavelength, as the incident photon. However, Raman founded that a small fraction of light scattered by liquids consists of photons with energies different from the incident ones. Each molecule has a unique Raman Spectrum. Since n two compounds have the same Raman spectrum, Raman spectroscopy can be used extensively in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of subatance in the calculation of thermodynamic properties and in the study of molecuaar structures.

After retiring from indian Institute in 1948, Raman opened his own Raman Research Institute in Bangalore n dengaged in his scientific intrests until death in 1970.

 The Raman Research Institute is now a flourishing research center, a living monument to Raman’s legacy.