C. V. Raman

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, India, to Tamil Iyer Brahmin parents, Chandrasekhar Ramanathan Iyer and Parvathi Ammal. He was the second of eight siblings. His father was a teacher at a local high school, and earned a modest income. He recalled: "I was born with a copper spoon in my mouth. At my birth my father was earning the magnificent salary of ten rupees per month!" In 1892, his family moved to Visakhapatnam (then Vizagapatam or Vizag) in Andhra Pradesh as his father was appointed to the faculty of physics at Mrs A.V. Narasimha Rao College. Raman was educated at the St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School, Visakhapatnam. He passed matriculation at age 11 and the First Examination in Arts examination (equivalent to today's intermediate examination, pre-university course) with a scholarship at age 13, securing first position in both under the Andhra Pradesh school board (now Andhra Pradesh Board of Secondary Education) examination. In 1904, he obtained a B.A. from the University of Madras, where he stood first and won the gold medals in physics and English. He earned an M.A. from the same university with highest distinction in 1907. His second paper published in the same journal that year was on surface tension of liquids. It was alongside Lord Rayleigh's paper on the sensitivity of ear to sound, and from which Lord Rayleigh started to communicate with Raman, courteously addressing him as Professor. Aware of Raman's capacity, his physics teacher Rhishard Llewellyn Jones insisted he continue research in England. Jones arranged for Raman's physical inspection with Colonel (Sir Gerald) Giffard. Raman often had poor health and was considered as a "weakling." The inspection revealed that he would not withstand the harsh weathers of England, ==Career==

Raman's elder brother Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar had joined the prestigious Indian government service, Indian Finance Service (now Indian Audit and Accounts Service). Raman followed suit and qualified for the Indian Finance Service achieving first position in the entrance examination in February 1907. He was posted in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as Assistant Accountant General in June 1907. or produced any research paper. The work inspired IACS to publish a journal, Bulletin of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, in 1909 in which Raman was the major contributor. Soon after he resumed office at Rangoon, he was transferred back to India at Nagpur, Maharashtra, in 1910. Even before he served a year in Nagpur, he was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and again posted to Calcutta. From the next year, other universities followed suit including University of Allahabad, Rangoon University, Queen's College (Indore), Institute of Science, Nagpur, Krishnath College, and University of Madras. By 1919, Raman had guided more than a dozen students. Following Sircar's death in 1919, Raman received two honorary positions at IACS — Honorary Professor and Honorary Secretary. Raman was chosen by the University of Calcutta to become the Palit Professor of Physics, a position established after the benefactor Sir Taraknath Palit, in 1913. The university senate made the appointment on 30 January 1914, as recorded in the meeting minutes:Prior to 1914, Ashutosh Mukherjee had invited Jagadish Chandra Bose to take up the position, but Bose declined. As a second choice, Raman became the first Palit Professor of Physics but was delayed for taking up the position as World War I broke out. It was only in 1917 when he joined Rajabazar Science College, a campus created by the University of Calcutta in 1914, that he became a full-fledged professor. He had earned quite a reputation by then, and his hosts were Nobel laureates J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford. Upon his election as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924, Mukherjee asked him of his future plans, which he replied, saying, "The Nobel Prize of course." The second volume of the journal published his famous article "A new radiation", reporting the discovery of the Raman effect. Raman was succeeded by Debendra Mohan Bose as the Palit Professor in 1932. Following his appointment as Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, he left Calcutta in 1933. Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the King of Mysore, Jamsetji Tata and Nawab Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad, had contributed the lands and funds for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The Viceroy of India, Lord Minto approved the establishment in 1909, and the British government appointed its first director, Morris Travers. Raman became the fourth director and the first Indian director. During his tenure at IISc, he recruited G. N. Ramachandran, who later went on to become a distinguished X-ray crystallographer. He founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1934 and started publishing the academy's journal Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences (later split up into Proceedings - Mathematical Sciences, Journal of Chemical Sciences, and Journal of Earth System Science). The company, renamed as TCM Limited in 1996, was one of the first organic and inorganic chemical manufacturers in India. In 1947, Raman was appointed the first National Professor by the new government of independent India. Raman retired from IISc in 1948 and established the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore a year later. He served as its director and remained active there until his death in 1970. == Scientific contributions ==

with other winners, from left C. V. Raman (physics), Hans Fischer (chemistry), Karl Landsteiner (medicine) and Sinclair Lewis (literature) Musical sound One of Raman's interests was on the scientific basis of musical sounds. He was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz's The Sensations of Tone, the book he came across when he joined IACS. He studied the acoustics of various violin and related instruments, including Indian stringed instruments, and water splashes. He even performed what he called "Experiments with mechanically-played violins." Raman also studied the uniqueness of Indian drums. His analyses of the harmonic nature of the sounds of tabla and mridangam were the first scientific studies on Indian percussions. He wrote a critical research on vibrations of the pianoforte string that was known as Kaufmann's theory (the first scientific description of vibration of musical strings made by German physicist Walter Kaufmann in 1895). During his brief visit of England in 1921, he managed to study how sound travels in the Whispring 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, to his later works on optics and quantum mechanics. Blue color of the sea Raman, in his broadening venture on optics, started to investigate scattering of light starting in 1919. His first phenomenal discovery of the physics of light was the blue color of seawater. During a voyage home from England on board the S.S. Narkunda in September 1921, he contemplated the blue color of the Mediterranean Sea. Using simple optical equipment, a pocket-sized spectroscope and a Nicol prism in hand, he studied the sea water. Of several hypotheses on the colour of the sea propounded at the time, 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 color 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 now known as Rayleigh scattering, the scattering of light and refraction by particles in the atmosphere. His explanation of the blue colour of water was instinctively accepted as correct. Raman could view the water using a Nicol prism to avoid the influence of sunlight reflected by the surface. He described how the sea appears even more blue than usual, contradicting Rayleigh. As soon as the S.S. Narkunda docked in Bombay Harbour (now Mumbai Harbour), Raman finished an article "The colour of the sea" that was published in the November 1921 issue of Nature. He noted that Rayleigh's explanation is "questionable by a simple mode of observation" (using Nicol prism). By early 1922, Raman came to a conclusion, as he reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London:True to his words, Ramanathan published an elaborate experimental finding in 1923. His subsequent study of the Bay of Bengal in 1924 provided the full evidence. It is now known that the intrinsic colour of water is mainly attributed to the selective absorption of longer wavelengths of light in the red and orange regions of the spectrum, owing to overtones of the infrared absorbing O-H (oxygen and hydrogen combined) stretching modes of water molecules. Raman effect Background Raman's second important discovery on the scattering of light was a new type of radiation, an eponymous phenomenon called the Raman effect. He referred to the phenomenon as "feeble fluorescence." But the theoretical attempts to justify the phenomenon were quite futile for the next two years. The major impetus was the discovery of Compton effect. Arthur Compton at Washington University in St. Louis had found evidence in 1923 that electromagnetic waves can also be described as particles. By 1927, the phenomenon was widely accepted by scientists, including Raman. As the news of Compton's Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in December 1927, Raman ecstatically told Krishnan, saying: But the origin of the inspiration went further. As Compton later recollected "that it was probably the Toronto debate that led him to discover the Raman effect two years later." Raman took Duane's side and said, "Compton, you're a very good debater, but the truth isn't in you."|240x240px Krishnan started the experiment in the beginning of January 1928. On 28 February 1928, they obtained spectra of the modified scattering separate from the incident light. Due to difficulty in measuring the wavelengths of light, they had been relying on visual observation of the colour produced from sunlight through prism. Raman had invented a type of spectrograph for detecting and measuring electromagnetic waves. Referring to the invention, Raman later remarked, "When I got my Nobel Prize, I had spent hardly 200 rupees on my equipment," although it was obvious that his total expenditure for the entire experiment was much more than that. From that moment they could employ the instrument using monochromatic light from a mercury arc lamp which penetrated transparent material and was allowed to fall on a spectrograph to record its spectrum. The lines of scattering could now be measured and photographed. Announcement The same day, Raman made the announcement before the press. The Associated Press of India reported it the next day, on 29 February, as "New theory of radiation: Prof. Raman's Discovery." It ran the story as:The news was reproduced by The Statesman on 1 March under the headline "Scattering of Light by Atoms – New Phenomenon – Calcutta Professor's Discovery." Raman submitted a three-paragraph report of the discovery on 8 March to Nature and was published on 21 April. The actual data was sent to the same journal on 22 March and was published on 5 May. Raman presented the formal and detailed description as "A new radiation" at the meeting of the South Indian Science Association in Bangalore on 16 March. His lecture was published in the Indian Journal of Physics on 31 March. On 20 June 1928, Peter Pringsheim at the University of Berlin was able to reproduce Raman's results successfully. He was the first to coin the terms Ramaneffekt and Linien des Ramaneffekts in his articles published the following months. Use of the English versions, "Raman effect" and "Raman lines" immediately followed. In addition to being a new phenomenon itself, the Raman effect was one of the earliest proofs of the quantum nature of light. Robert W. Wood at the Johns Hopkins University was the first American to confirm the Raman effect in early 1929. He made a series of experimental verification, after which he commented, saying, "It appears to me that this very beautiful discovery which resulted from Raman's long and patient study of the phenomenon of light scattering is one of the most convincing proofs of the quantum theory". The field of Raman spectroscopy came to be based on this phenomenon, and Ernest Rutherford, President of the Royal Society, referred to it in his presentation of the Hughes Medal to Raman in 1930 as "among the best three or four discoveries in experimental physics in the last decade". He did eventually win that year. Later work Raman had association with the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. He attended the foundation ceremony of BHU and delivered lectures on mathematics and "Some new paths in physics" during the lecture series organised at the university from 5 to 8 February 1916. He also held the position of permanent visiting professor. With Suri Bhagavantam, he determined the spin of photons in 1932, which further confirmed the quantum nature of light. Modulators, and switching systems based on this effect have enabled optical communication components based on laser systems. Other investigations he carried out included experimental and theoretical studies on the diffraction of light by acoustic waves of ultrasonic and hypersonic frequencies, and those on the effects produced by X-rays on infrared vibrations in crystals exposed to ordinary light which were published between 1935 and 1942. In 1948, through studying the spectroscopic behaviour of crystals, he approached the fundamental problems of crystal dynamics in a new manner. He dealt with the structure and properties of diamond from 1944 to 1968, the structure and optical behaviour of numerous iridescent substances including labradorite, pearly feldspar, agate, quartz, opal, and pearl in the early 1950s. Among his other interests were the optics of colloids, and electrical and magnetic anisotropy. His last interests in the 1960s were on biological properties such as the colours of flowers and the physiology of human vision. ==Personal life==

Raman married Lokasundari Ammal, daughter of S. Krishnaswami Iyer who was the Superintendent of Sea Customs at Madras, in 1907. but Raman's great-niece and biographer, Uma Parameswaran, revealed a factual date of 2 June 1907. It was a self-arranged marriage and his wife was 13 years old. (Sources are contradicting on her age as her birth year is specified as 1892, corroborated by her obituary in Current Science that mentioned her age as 86 on her death on 22 May 1980.) His wife later jokingly recounted that their marriage was not so much about her musical prowess (she was playing veena when they first met) as "the extra allowance which the Finance Department gave to its married officers." Raman's elder brother Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar's son Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. Throughout his life, Raman developed an extensive personal collection of stones, minerals, and materials with interesting light-scattering properties, which he obtained from his world travels and as gifts. He often carried a small, handheld spectroscope to study specimens. These, along with his spectrograph, are on display at IISc. Lord Rutherford was instrumental in some of Raman's most pivotal moments in life. He nominated Raman for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, presented him the Hughes Medal as President of the Royal Society in 1930, and recommended him for the position of Director at IISc in 1932. He knew that if he were to receive the Nobel Prize, he could not wait for the announcement of the Nobel Committee normally made towards the end of the year considering the time required to reach Sweden by sea route. With confidence, he booked two tickets, one for his wife, for a steamship to Stockholm in July 1930. Soon after he received the Nobel Prize, he was asked in an interview the possible consequences if he had discovered the Raman effect earlier, which he replied, "Then I should have shared the Nobel Prize with Compton and I should not have liked that; I would rather receive the whole of it." Religious views Although Raman hardly talked about religion, he was openly an agnostic, but objected to being labelled atheist. He resented Hindu traditional rituals He was also influenced by the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Traditional pagri (Indian turban) with a tuft underneath and a upanayana (Hindu sacred thread) were his signature attire. Though it was not customary to wear turbans in South Indian culture, he explained his habit as, "Oh, if I did not wear one, my head will swell. You all praise me so much and I need a turban to contain my ego." He even attributed his turban for the recognition he received on his first visit to England, particularly from J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford. In a public speech, he once said,In a friendly meeting with Mahatma Gandhi and Gilbert Rahm, a German zoologist, the conversation turned to religion. Raman spoke,On his deathbed, he said to his wife, "I believe only in the Spirit of Man," and asked for his funeral, "Just a clean and simple cremation for me, no mumbo-jumbo please." == Death ==

At the end of October 1970, Raman had a cardiac arrest and collapsed in his laboratory. He was moved to the hospital where doctors diagnosed his condition and declared that he would not survive for another four hours. He however survived a few days and requested to stay in the gardens of his institute surrounded by his followers and fans. Two days before Raman died, he told one of his former students, "Do not allow the journals of the Academy to die, for they are the sensitive indicators of the quality of science being done in the country and whether science is taking root in it or not." That evening, Raman met with the Board of Management of his institute in his bedroom and discussed with them the fate of the institute's management. He also willed his wife to perform a simple cremation without any rituals upon his death. He died from natural causes early the next morning on 21 November 1970 at the age of 82. With the news of Raman's death, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi publicly announced, saying, == Controversies ==

The Nobel Prize Independent discovery In 1928, Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam at the Moscow State University independently discovered the Raman effect. They published their findings in July issue of Naturwissenschaften, and presented their findings at the Sixth Congress of the Russian Association of Physicists held at Saratov between 5 and 16 August. In 1930, they were nominated for the Nobel Prize alongside Raman. According to the Nobel Committee, however: (1) the Russians did not come to an independent interpretation of their discovery as they cited Raman's article; (2) they observed the effect only in crystals, whereas Raman and Krishnan observed it in solids, liquids and gases, and therefore proved the universal nature of the effect; (3) the problems concerning the intensity of Raman and infrared lines in the spectra had been explained during the previous year; (4) the Raman method had been applied with great success in different fields of molecular physics; and (5) the Raman effect had effectively helped to check the symmetry properties of molecules, and thus the problems concerning nuclear spin in atomic physics. Evidence later appeared that the Russians had discovered the phenomenon earlier, a week before Raman and Krishnan's discovery. According to Mandelstam's letter (to Orest Khvolson), the Russian had observed the spectral line on 21 February 1928. Role of Krishnan Krishnan was not nominated for the Nobel Prize even though he was the main researcher in discovering the Raman effect. Krishnan himself never claimed himself worthy of the prize. But Raman admitted later that Krishnan was the co-discoverer. The Raman–Born controversy From October 1933 to March 1934, Max Born was employed by IISc as Reader in Theoretical Physics following the invitation by Raman early in 1933. Born at the time was a refugee from Nazi Germany and temporarily employed at St John's College, Cambridge. Since the beginning of the 20th century Born had developed a theory on lattice dynamics based on thermal properties. He presented his theory in one of his lectures at IISc. By then Raman had developed a different theory and claimed that Born's theory contradicted the experimental data. In this dispute, Born received support from most physicists, as his view was proven to be a better explanation. Beyond the intellectual debate, their rivalry extended to personal and social levels. Born later said that Raman probably thought of him as an "enemy." Born was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize specifically for his contributions to lattice theory, and eventually won it for his statistical works on quantum mechanics in 1954. The account was written as a "belated Nobel Prize." Indian authorities Raman had an aversion to the then Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru's policies on science. In one instance he smashed the bust of Nehru on the floor. In another, he shattered his Bharat Ratna medallion to pieces with a hammer, as it was given to him by the Nehru government. He publicly ridiculed Nehru when the latter visited the Raman Research Institute in 1948. There they displayed a piece of gold and copper against an ultraviolet light. Nehru was tricked into believing that copper which glowed more brilliantly than any other metal was gold. Raman was quick to remark, "Mr Prime Minister, everything that glitters is not gold." On the same occasion, Nehru offered Raman financial assistance to his institute which Raman flatly refused by replying, "I certainly don't want this to become another government laboratory." He remained hostile to people associated with these establishments including Homi J. Bhabha, S.S. Bhatnagar, and his once favourite student, Krishnan. He even called such programmes as the "Nehru–Bhatnagar effect." In 1959, Raman proposed to establish another research institute in Madras. The Government of Madras advised him to apply for funds from the central government. But Raman clearly foresaw as he replied to C. Subramaniam, then the Minister for Finance Education in Madras, that his proposal to Nehru's government "would be met with a refusal." So ended the plan. In 1933, the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA), at the time the largest scientific organisation, planned to establish a national science body, which would be authorised to advise the government on scientific matters. Sir Richard Gregory, then editor of Nature, on his visit to India had suggested Raman, as editor of Current Science, to establish an Indian Academy of Sciences. Raman thought that it should be an exclusively Indian membership as opposed to the general consensus that British members should be included. He resolved "How can India Science prosper under the tutelage of an academy which has its own council of 30, 15 of who are Britishers of whom only two or three are fit enough to be its Fellows." On 1 April 1933, he convened a separate meeting of the South Indian scientists. He and Subba Rao officially resigned from ISCA. Raman registered the new organisation as the Indian Academy of Sciences on 24 April to the Registrar of Societies. He wanted research in physics at the level of those of western institutes, but at the expense of other fields of science. The Council of IISc constituted a review committee to oversee Raman's conduct in January 1936. The committee, chaired by James Irvine, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, reported in March that Raman had misused the funds and entirely shifted the "centre of gravity" towards research in physics, and also that the proposal of Born as Professor of Mathematical Physics (which was already approved by the Council in November 1935) was not financially feasible. The Royal Society Raman never seemed to have thought highly of the Fellowship of the Royal Society. One reason could be Raman's objection to the designation "British subjects" as one of the categories of the Fellows. Particularly after the Independence of India, the Royal Society had its own disputes on this matter. According to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, The London Times had once made a list of the Fellows, in which Raman was omitted. Raman wrote to and demanded an explanation from Patrick Blackett, the then President of the society. He was dejected by Blackett's response that the society had no role in the newspaper. According to Krishnan, another cause was a disapproving review Raman received on a manuscript he had submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society. It could have been these cumulative factors as Raman wrote in his resignation letter, and said, "I have taken this decision after careful consideration of all the circumstances of the case. I would request that my resignation be accepted and my name removed from the list of the Fellows of the Society." Sohonie became the first woman to be admitted into the institute. She would later say, "Though Raman was a great scientist, he was very narrow-minded. I can never forget the way he treated me just because I was a woman. Even then, Raman didn't admit me as a regular student. This was a great insult to me. The bias against women was so bad at that time. What can one expect if even a Nobel Laureate behaves in such a way?"'''' Also after a year, many women got their admission to the institution. == Honours and awards ==

Raman was honoured with many honorary doctorates and memberships of scientific societies. Within India, apart from being the founder and President of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc), he was a Fellow of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (FASB), and from 1943, a Foundation Fellow of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (FIAS). In 1935, he was appointed a Foundation Fellow of the National Institute of Sciences of India (FNI, now the Indian National Science Academy. In 1924, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was the President of the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929. He was the founder and President of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1933 until his death. • In 1913, he received the Woodburn Research Medal, while still working in the Indian Finance Service. • In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him." • In 1957, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. • Postal stamps featuring Raman were issued in 1971 and 2009. • A road in India's capital, New Delhi, is named C. V. Raman Marg. • An area in eastern Bangalore is called CV Raman Nagar. • The road running north of the national seminar complex in Bangalore is named C. V. Raman Road. • A road in Mylapore, Chennai is named CV Raman Road. • A building at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore is named the Raman Building. • A hospital in eastern Bangalore on 80 Ft. Rd. is named the Sir C. V. Raman Hospital. • There is also CV Raman Nagar in Trichy, his birthplace. • Raman, a lunar crater is named after C. V. Raman. • C. V. Raman Global University was established in 1997. • In 1998, the American Chemical Society and Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science recognised Raman's discovery as an International Historic Chemical Landmark at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Jadavpur, Calcutta, India. The inscription on the commemoration plaque reads: • Dr. C.V. Raman University was established in Chhattisgarh in 2006. • On 7 November 2013, a Google Doodle honoured Raman on the 125th anniversary of his birthday. • Raman Science Centre in Nagpur is named after Sir C. V. Raman. • Dr. C.V. Raman University, Bihar was established in 2018. • Dr. C.V. Raman University, Khandwa was established in 2018. == In popular culture ==

• C. V. Raman: The Scientist and His Legacy, a biopic about Raman directed by Nandan Kudhyadi released in 1989. It won the National Film Award for Best Biographical Film. • Beyond Rainbows: The Quest & Achievement of Dr. C.V. Raman, a documentary film on the physicist directed by Ananya Banerjee aired on Doordarshan, the Indian national public broadcaster, in 2004. • Rocket Boys, an Indian Hindi-language biographical streaming television series on SonyLIV. The character of C.V. Raman was played by T.M. Karthik. ==See also==