On busy Bowbazar Street in Calcutta is an old building at 210. It is the headquarters of the country's pioneering scientific body, the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science. On a December evening in 1927 there was much excitement in one of its laboratories.
Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman was showing a visitor some of his instruments when a bespectacled young man, K.S. Krishnan, rushed in and announced, "professor Compton has won the Nobel Prize."
Raman was equally delighted. "Excellent news," he said, beaming at the visitor. And then he was lost in thought. "But...look here, Krishnan," he said turning to the young man, "if this Compton effect is true of X-rays, it must be true of light too. " A few years earlier, A.H. Compton had shown that the nature of X-rays changes when passed through matter. The change was dependent on the kind of matter. This effect was called the "Compton Effect. "
Could light also change its nature when passed through a transparent medium? That was the question that Raman asked. For five years he had been doing research in optics, the science of light. No sophisticated equipment was available in his laboratory , but Raman was confident that he could find the answer with some modifications in his equipment.
Four months later, on March 16, 1928, Raman announced his discovery of "new radiation" to an assembly of scientists at Bangalore. The world hailed the discovery as the "Raman Effect. " For scientific research in this country, it was a red letter day. With equipment worth hardly Rs 200/- and meagre facilities,Raman was able to make a discovery which won him the 1930 Nobel Prize in physics.
Raman was born on November 7, 1888, at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu. His father was a college physics teacher. He was a brilliant student from the very start.When Raman passed his matriculation, his parents were keen to send him abroad for higher studies. But on medical grounds a British surgeon advised them against it and Raman stayed in the country to do the M.A. course at Presidency College in Madras.
Science had already made an impression on him and he began to write research papers for reputed science journals. When he was only 19, he became a member of the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science. Meanwhile, respecting his parents' wishes, he took up an administrative job in the Finance Ministry in Calcutta. His interest in science, however, did not flag. He used to spend his hours after office in the laboratory of the association, work.ing late into the night, sometimes throughout the night.
In his youth, Raman was mainly interested in acoustics, the science of sound. He studied how bowed string instruments like the violin and the sitar could ; produce harmonious music. He was so taken up with it that after he finished a lecture on the acoustics of the violin, a scientist in the audience jocularly asked him whether he wanted to become Fellow of the Royal Society by fiddling in physics. That was in London in 1921 and it set him thinking.
On his return journey aboard a liner the blueness of the sky and the sea intrigued him. Why were they blue? Sitting on the deck of the ship, he sought the answer .And he came to the conclusion that the blueness was due to the scattering of light by water molecules. This intuition had to be tested. On his return to his laboratory in Calcutta he lost no time trying to prove the theory. Thus began his research in optics that was to make him famous.
In 1924 Raman was elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his contributions to optics. Six years later , when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he won world acclaim.
In 1943, he founded his own ins-titute near Bangalore, the Raman Research Institute, a palatial building set in the midst of gardens and trees. Here he continued to work till his death on November 20, 1970.
Raman never lost his interest in acoustics and one of his significant discoveries is that the mridangam and the tabla , unlike other drums, possess harmonic overtones.
In his later days, anything that w,as colourful, whether it was a butterfly, gem or flower, fascinated him. He was ever asking questions. Why do things look beautiful? What makes gems and stones bright and colourful? And he was ever trying to find the answers.
His advice to young scientists was also to look at the world around them and not to confine themselves to their laboratories. "The essence of science," he said,"is independent thinking and hard work, not equipment."
