Biography of C.V Raman, a pride of Indian Science

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Biography of C.V. Raman, a pride of Indian Science

CV Raman

C.V Raman is one of the most renowned scientists produced by India. His full name was Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. He is a world-renowned Indian physicist and brought honour to the Indian nation through his contribution to the field of Physics.
C.V Raman made remarkable discoveries and his theory is called the Raman Effect, and it deals with a concept known as Raman Scattering.
Here's a short brief of his enormous work of life.

Early Life and Family

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7, 1888, in the city of Trichinopoly, Madras Presidency, British India. Today the city is known as Tiruchirappalli and sits in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. 
Raman's father was Chandrasekharan Ramanathan Iyer. He was a teacher of mathematics and physics. His mother was Parvathi Ammal. Raman was the second of eight siblings. At the time of Raman's birth, the family lived on a very low income.
When Raman was four years old, his father got a better job, became a college lecturer, and moved to Waltair (now Visakhapatnam). This opened a huge window for Raman to move forward.
Raman was married to Lokasundari Ammal in 1907. They had two sons, Chandrasekhar Raman and radio-astronomer Venkatraman Radhakrishnan. Raman was the paternal uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, recipient of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Education

Raman studied at St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School. He passed matriculation at the age of only 11 and the FA examination with a scholarship at the age of 13, securing the first position in both under the Andhra Pradesh School Board Examination.
In 1902, Raman joined the Presidency College in Madras (now Chennai) where his father had been transferred to teach Mathematics and Physics.
When Raman returned home after his first year at college, his parents were shaken by his unhealthy appearance. So that they set up a house for him in Madras.
He completed his degree in 1904, winning medals in both Physics and English. At age 18, while still a graduate student, he published his first scientific paper on "Unsymmetrical Diffraction Bands Due to a Rectangular Aperture" in the British journal "Philosophical Magazine" in 1906.
He completed an M.A. degree from the same university with the highest distinction in 1907. His second paper was published in the same journal that year was on the surface tension of liquids. It was alongside Lord Rayleigh's paper on the sensitivity of the ear to sound.
From this Lord Rayleigh started to communicate with Raman addressing him as "Professor". It was certainly an achievement for young Raman.
His British lectures encouraged him to study for a master's degree in the United Kingdom. Madras's civil surgeon, however, told him that his health was not suitable enough to face the British climate. He advised Raman to stay in India.

Research Works

Raman had a wonderful life full of a lot of research works. He was one of the leading scientific researchers of the world during that time.
Raman's first phenomenal discovery of physics was the blue colour of seawater. During a voyage home from England on board the S.S. Narkunda in September 1921, he contemplated the blue colour of the Mediterranean Sea. 
Using simple optical equipment, a pocket-sized spectroscope and a Nicol prism in hand, he studied the seawater. Of several hypotheses on the colour of the sea, the best explanation had been that of Lord Rayleigh's in 1910.
According to which "The much-admired dark blue of the deep sea has nothing to do with the colour of water, but is simply the blue of the sky seen by reflection". Rayleigh had correctly described the nature of the blue sky by a phenomenon known as Rayleigh Scattering. The Nicol prism allowed Raman to view the water without the influence of sunlight reflected by the surface. He described how the sea appears even more blue than usual, contradicting Rayleigh.
However, Raman finished the article "The colour of the Sea" and published it in November 1921.
Raman worked out the theory of transverse vibration of bowed string instruments, based on the supervision of velocities. One of his earliest studies was on the wolf tome in violins and cellos.
Raman also studied the uniqueness of Indian drums. His analyses of the harmonic nature of the sound of tabla and mridangam were the first scientific studies on Indian percussion.
During his brief visit to England in 1921, he managed to study how sound travels in the whispering gallery of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London that produces unusual sound effects. His work on acoustics was an important prelude, both experimentally and conceptually.
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 colour, and found various liquids. Sixty of them did indeed change the colour of the light. They first observed this in April 1923.
In 1927, they found a particularly strong colour change in light scattered by glycerol. Raman's team observed the effect on gases, crystals and glasses. This effect might have been mistaken for fluorescence, another phenomenon in which light has its colour 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 is a colour change accompanied by polarization that had never been seen before. The inelastic scattering at its heart was a further, very strong confirmation of the quantum theory.
The Raman Effect is very small compared with Rayleigh's Scattering. Only about one in ten million photons undergo this type of scattering.
Raman and his colleague K.S. Krishnan reported their discovery in March 1928 in Nature.
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.

Civil Serviceman Raman

In no condition to study abroad, Raman followed suit and qualified for the Indian Finance Service with the first position in the entrance examination in February 1907. He was posted in Kolkata as Assistant Accountant General in June 1907. It was there that he became highly impressed with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), the first research institute founded in India in 1876.
Amrita Lal Sircar, founder and secretary of IACS, and Ashutosh Mukherjee, executive member of the institute and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, permitted him to research on his own time as he was a serviceman along with research works.
In 1909, Raman was transferred to Rangoon, British Burma (now Myanmar), to take up the position of currency officer. After only a few months, he had to return to Madras because of his father's severe illness.
He was transferred to Nagpur, Maharashtra in 1910. Even before he served for a year in Nagpur, he was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and again posted to Calcutta. In 1914, he resigned from civil service.

Palit Chair

Raman's part-time research work and his lectures were impressive, establishing his reputation as a highly talented physicist. In 1917, the University of Calcutta sought him out and offered him the Palit Chair of Physics.
Raman's appointment as the Palit Professor was strongly objected to by some members, as Raman had no PhD and had never studied abroad. 
Ashutosh Mukherjee arranged for an honorary DSc which the University of Calcutta conferred Raman in 1921. The same year he visited Oxford to deliver a lecture.

First National Professor of India

In 1933, Raman became the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. In 1947, he became independent India's first National Professor. In 1948, he founded the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, where he worked until the end of his life.

Awards and Recognitions

Raman was honoured with many honorary doctorates and memberships of scientific societies. Some of them are mentioned below:
  • Member of the Deutsche Akademie of Munich
  • Member of Swiss Physical Society of Zurich
  • Member of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow
  • Member of the Royal Irish Academy
  • Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
  • Member of Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.
  • Member of Optical Society of American and Mineralogical Society of America
  • Member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences
  • Member of Catgut Acoustical Society of America and Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
Besides these, in 1924, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. However, he resigned from the fellowship in 1968. He was the President of the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929.
He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1961. He was the founder President of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1933 till his death.
The famous physicist was awarded by many famous and recognized institutions all over the world. Each of them was an obvious earning of his great scientific career.
  • In 1912, Raman received the Curzon Research Award
  • In 1913, he received the Woodburn Research Medal
  • In 1928, he received the Matteucci Medal from the Accademia Nazionale Delle Scienze in Rome.
  • In 1930, Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, conferred him a Knight Bachelor in a special ceremony at the Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi.
  • In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the "Scattering of Light" and the discovery of the effect named after him. He was the first Asian and first non-white to receive any Nobel Prize in science.
  • In 1930, he received the Hughes Medal of the Royal Science.
  • In 1941, he was awarded the Franklin Medal by the Franklin Institue in Philadelphia.
  • In 1954, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna.
  • In 1957, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

Death

At the end of October in 1970, Raman had a cardiac arrest and collapsed in his laboratory. He was moved to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed his condition. He died, aged 82, of heart disease on November 21, 1970, in Bangalore, India.


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