It has been said over and over again that India has been the home to many great scientists. One of the most lauded amongst these scientists is Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and rightfully so. Sir C.V. Raman, as we know him, was the first Asian and non-white scientist to receive a Nobel prize in the field of science. He was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his pioneering work on the scattering of light.
C.V. Raman’s fascination with the scattering of light began with his curiosity about the deep blue colour of the Mediterranean on his journey to Bombay from London in the SS Narkunda. The explanation he was given was that the water simply reflects the colour of the sky. However, he was not satisfied with the explanation and dug deeper. Soon, he was able to conclusively prove that the deep blue colour of the sea was a product of the scattering of the sunlight by the water molecules. This began an obsession that would change his life and India’s position in the world forever.
C.V. Raman with his group in Kolkata (then Calcutta) began measuring the scattering of light through liquids which was quite challenging. A violet beam from the solar spectrum was passed through the liquid using a violet filter. Most of the emergent light was the same colour as the original. However, C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan were able to show that there was little light in a different colour which they isolated using a green filter. Raman stated in his first report to Nature that they had tested 60 different liquids and arrived at the same conclusion. A little part of the emergent light was a different colour from the original beam. This was named the Raman effect. It was a very minuscule effect; only one in a million photons exhibited this change in wavelength. Raman went on to improve on his results by using brighter and more direct sources of light and a quartz spectrograph. The Raman effect was heavily discussed by scientists and drew praise from all over the world. In the first seven years after its discovery, it was the subject of over 700 hundred papers in scientific literature. Over 70 years later, scientists are still working on the results and applications of the Raman effect.
C.V. Raman was a game changer in many ways. He brought India great respect from scientists and people all around the world. I hope to see many from our generation making our country’s name shine bright in the near future! In the spirit of Republic Day, let us keep our heads high and make our country proud.
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