Background

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 Chandrasekaran Ramanathan Iyer, a teacher of mathematics and physics. His mother was Parvathi Ammal, who was taught to read and write by her husband. At the time of Raman's birth, the family lived on a low income. Raman was the second of eight children.

When Raman was four years old his father got a better job, becoming a college lecturer, and the family moved to Waltair (now Visakhapatnam).

Education

From a very young age, Raman was interested in science, reading the books his father had used as a student. As he grew older, he started borrowing mathematics and physics books from his father's college library. Entering his teenage years, he began learning from books his father had bought when he had intended to take a master's degree in physics.

Raman attended St. Aloysius Anglo-Indian High School at Vishakapatnam. He was a brilliant student and passed his matriculation examination when he was just 11. At the age of 13, he passed his F.A. examination (equivalent to today's intermediate examination) with a scholarship.

In 1903, aged just 14, he set off for the great city of Madras (now Chennai) to live in a hostel and begin a bachelor's degree at Presidency College. When Raman returned home after his first year at college, his parents were shaken by his unhealthy appearance. They set up a house for him in Madras, where he could be looked after by his grandparents.

Raman was enormously enthusiastic about science. On vacations, he would demonstrate experiments to his younger brothers and sisters. He completed his degree in 1904, winning medals in physics and English. His British lecturers 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 robust enough to withstand the British climate; he advised Raman to stay in India.

This was probably excellent advice. The brilliant mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, born just a year before Raman, traveled from Madras to work at the University of Cambridge in 1914. Although this led to the creation of some exceptional mathematics, it had a severe impact on Ramanujan's health.

Raman was awarded a scholarship and he remained at Presidency College to study for his master's degree. His outstanding potential was recognized, and he was given unlimited access to the laboratories, where he pursued investigations of his own design.

In November 1906, aged 18, Raman had his first academic paper published. He had initially given it to one of his professors to read, but the professor had not bothered. Raman sent his paper directly to Philosophical Magazine and it was accepted. Its title was Unsymmetrical diffraction-bands due to a rectangular aperture: it was about the behavior of light.

Following the publication of his second paper in Philosophical Magazine, Raman received a letter from Lord Rayleigh, the eminent British physicist. Rayleigh, unaware that Raman was just a teenage student, sent his letter to "Professor Raman."

In 1907, aged 19, Raman graduated with a master's degree in physics, awarded with the highest distinction.

Career

Because of poor health, he was unable to go to England for further education. With nothing else available in India, in 1907 he passed the Financial Civil Service exam, married, and was posted to Calcutta as assistant accountant general.

Shortly after arriving in Calcutta, Raman began after-hours research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). In the first 10 years, working almost alone, he published 27 research papers and led the way for the IACS to become recognized as a vibrant research institute. Much of this early work was on the theory of vibrations as it related to musical instruments. After brief postings in Rangoon and Nagpur, he returned to Calcutta, took up residence next door to the IACS, and constructed a door that led directly into the institute, giving him access at any time. He received research prizes in 1912 and 1913 while he was still a full-time civil servant.

At the age of 29, he resigned from his lucrative civil service job when Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, vice-chancellor, Calcutta University, offered him the Palit Chair Professorship. He continued to lecture even though it was not required, and he used the IACS as the research arm of the university. By the time of his first visit to England in 1921, his reputation in physics was well known. Three years later he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society - only the fourth Indian so honored. That same year he toured the United States, spending four months at the California Institute of Technology through the invitation of Nobel Laureate Robert Millikan.

After discovering the Raman Effect in 1928, he was knighted by the British government in India and received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930. Three years later, Raman left Calcutta for Bangalore, where he served as head of the Indian Institute of Science. There he continued his work on the Raman Effect and became interested in the structure of crystals, especially diamond. In 1934 he founded the Indian Academy of Science and began the publication of its Proceedings.

In 1948 he became director of the newly constructed Raman Research Institute, where he remained continually active, delivering his last lecture just two weeks before his death. His research interests changed in later years when he primarily investigated the perception of color.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman died, aged 82, of heart disease on November 21, 1970, in Bangalore, India.

Achievements

• Raman is best known for discovering the Raman Effect, or the inelastic scattering of a photon. He showed through experimentation that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This was a groundbreaking discovery in early 20th century physics.
  
  He won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman Effect," becoming the first Indian to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. He was honored with the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, in 1954 in recognition of his invaluable contributions to the field of science.
  
  Raman has been honored with a large number of honorary doctorates and memberships of scientific societies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society early in his career (1924) and was knighted in 1929.

Religion

Raman's family were Brahmins, the Hindu caste of priests and scholars. His father, however, paid little attention to religious matters: Raman grew up to share his father's casual attitude to religion, but he did observe some Hindu rituals culturally and respected traditions such as vegetarianism.

Politics

Raman was suspicious of governments playing any role in fundamental science, refusing government funding for his work: "I strongly believe that fundamental science cannot be driven by instructional, industrial and government or military pressures. This was the reason why I decided, as far as possible, not to accept money from the government."

Views

Raman and his students researched light scattering in gases, liquids, and solids.

They used monochromatic light - sunlight that had been filtered to leave only a single color - and found that a variety of different liquids - sixty of them - did indeed change the color of the light. They first observed this in April 1923, but very weakly.

In 1927, they found a particularly strong color change in light scattered by glycerol (then called glycerine): "...the highly interesting result that the color of sunlight scattered in a highly purified sample of glycerine was a brilliant green instead of the usual blue."

Raman's team observed the effect in gases, crystals, and glass. The effect might have been mistaken for fluorescence, another phenomenon in which light has its color 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 - a color change accompanied by polarization - 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 a very small effect compared with Rayleigh scattering. Only about 1 in ten million photons undergoes inelastic scattering.

Raman and his colleague Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan reported their discovery in March 1928 in Nature.

Quotations: "I am the master of my failure... If I never fail how will I ever learn."

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

"The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter."

"If someone judges you, they are wasting space in their mind... Best part, it’s their problem."

Membership

• Deutsche Akademie of Munich

• Swiss Physical Society of Zürich

• 

  Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow

• 

  Royal Irish Academy

• 

  Hungarian Academy of Sciences

• Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.

• 

  Optical Society of America

• 

  Mineralogical Society of America

• 

  Romanian Academy of Sciences

• Catgut Acoustical Society of America

• Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences

• 

  Royal Society

  1924 - 1968

• 

  Founder President

  Indian Academy of Sciences

  1933 - 1970

• 

  Pontifical Academy of Sciences

  1961

Personality

Raman had a booming voice, superb diction, and rich humor.

Interests

• Reading

• Politicians

  Gandhi

• Writers

  The Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz

Connections

Chandrasekhara Raman married Lokasundari Ammal in 1907. The couple had two sons: Radhakrishnan, who became a distinguished astrophysicist, and Chandrasekhar.

Father:

Chandrasekaran Ramanathan Iyer

Mother:

Parvathi Ammal

Spouse:

Lokasundari Ammal

(married 1907)

Son:

Chandrasekhar Raman

Son:

Venkatraman Radhakrishnan

colleague:

Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan

Sir Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan was an Indian physicist. He was a co-discoverer of the Raman effect, for which his mentor Raman was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.