I have never seen
anyone who enjoyed science so much. The
sheer joy of seeing things and doing science filled him with exuberance and
excitement. He had an incredible zest
for life. He enjoyed his food, his
jokes, his fights and quarrels. Yet the
enjoyment he had for his science was something apart. In this pursuit it was as if his ego
disappeared completely in the presence of effulgent Nature. Yes, he was truly lost in the wonder and
beauty of what he was trying to comprehend.
Biographer
S Ramaseshan on C V Raman
[This write-up is based
on the talks I have given over the last two decades, especially in schools and
colleges and generally on 28th February, the National Science Day, on the
significance of the day in relation to the life and work of India’s only native
and home-grown science Nobel Laureate, C V Raman in whose research institute I
had the privilege to work for my doctorate degree during 1977-81. I am
uploading this post to coincide with the day this year.]
28Feb28
28 February 1928 was
the day when one of the greatest experimental discoveries in the annals of
twentieth century science was definitively confirmed in a nondescript
laboratory at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in
Kolkata (then Calcutta) with some of the most primitive equipment then in existence
by a group of physicists led by Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1988 -1970) and
announced by him to the news media the very next day. He followed it up with a formal lecture on
the discovery, titled "A New Radiation", in the inaugural session of
the South Indian Science Association on the 16th March 1928 at the Central
College in Bangalore. Incidentally, the
lecture hall in the Cental College where this happened is named after him and I
had the privilege of attending many classes and lectures in it as a
postgraduate student of Physics in the late fifties.
As the news of the
discovery spread and received swift confirmation from several of the better
established laboratories around the world, C V Raman began to believe that it
would fetch him the highest award one could dream of in the scientific world,
something that he had the audacity to promise himself five years earlier! So convinced and cocksure was he that the
Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 would be awarded to him that he had, in the
words of his biographer, "... booked two tickets for himself and his wife
in July that year to enable them to reach Stockholm in early December!".
No, there is no evidence that any astrologer had predicted the outcome!
Incidentally, Raman's biographer Dr S Ramaseshan, who was also a nephew as well
as a student of Raman, vehemently rubbished any connection between the former
and astrology while reacting to a mischievous innuendo from a 'noted
astrologer' to such an implied link through his wife.
Raman was not
disappointed with his outrageously confident expectation. The Nobel Committee
did give its 1930 Physics Nobel Prize to him graciously and exclusively for his discovery that came
to be recognized as the Raman Effect. There are few instances in the history of the
Nobel Prize of such a short gap between discovery and recognition. The rest is history, marking one of the most
memorable moments in the quest for scientific glory in India, a moment that is being commemorated
as the National Science Day ever since it was so designated in 1986.
Raman the Physicist
Born near Trichy in
Tamilnadu in 1888, Raman had his school education in Vishakhapatnam where his
father taught Mathematics in a college and stimulated Raman’s early interest
in both Mathematics and Physics. Later
he moved to Chennai (then Madras) and joined the famous Presidency
College. He was an exceptionally
brilliant student in both Physics and English and obtained his B A degree when
he was just 15. While still an
undergraduate, he had begun some meaningful research on Acoustics and Optics
and published his first research paper at the age of 18. He obtained his M A degree in Physics with
the highest honours aged just 19.
Circumstances however compelled him to take up a lucrative position in
the Indian Finance Department in Calcutta, a turn of events in some ways
similar to that of Einstein. His
interest in Physics couldn’t be held back too long and he fortuitously made
contact with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science where he
spent most of his spare time doing some independent research with the meagre resources
available. He soon came into limelight with his irrepressible talents and
became a Professor of Physics in the Calcutta University in 1917, a switch that
meant a considerable financial sacrifice.
In 1921 he attended a Universities Congress at Oxford and lectured
on the theory of stringed instruments before the Royal Society of London. In 1924 he was conferred the very prestigious
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS).
At the invitation of Robert Millikan, he spent five months at the
California Institute of Technology, USA the same year. His historic discovery relating to light
scattering, called the Raman Effect, came four years later and the Nobel Prize
for it soon after. Decades later, a
grateful and independent India bestowed upon him the nation’s highest honour,
the Bharat Ratna award, the same year
it was instituted (1954).
Raman was such a strongly egotistic and domineering personality that he couldn’t
get on well with the people who mattered in Calcutta, including the great
astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, and decided to move to the Indian Institute of
Science (IISc) in Bangalore to head its Physics department in 1933. With this, the centre of gravity of Indian
science shifted from its long standing base in Calcutta to Bangalore. Raman was
later elevated to the directorship of IISc, but had to revert to his earlier
position because of serious conflict with the governing council of the
institute. After his retirement in 1948
he founded his own institute for scientific research in Bangalore and staunchly
maintained its administrative independence, uninfluenced by other
considerations. It was only after his
death that the Raman Research Institute (RRI) came under the official umbrella
of the Department of Science and Technology of the union government.
Here is a picture of Raman with his collection of awards at the Raman
Research Institute in Bangalore.
The Raman Effect
It is not my
intention here to give a detailed account of the discovery of the Raman Effect,
its significance and how it can be
understood within the framework of quantum theoretical physics; nor is it my
intention to delve into its extensive applications in science and industry
following its rebirth after the invention of the laser. However, a cursory treatment of the
underlying principles may be in order.
When light is
incident on matter in any state – transparent solids/liquids or a gas – the
light photons are scattered by the molecules or atoms of the material. A considerable fraction of the photons move
away in different directions, without losing or gaining any energy in the
process. This is the well-known Rayleigh scattering phenomenon. Because
of unchanged photon energy, and hence of the wavelength/frequency or colour,
the scattering is said to be elastic.
In very rare cases, the photon energy decreases or increases due to an
electromagnetic interaction with the molecule/atom of the scattering material,
thereby the wavelength or colour of the incident radiation is altered. This is an inelastic scattering process, theoretically envisaged before Raman
and his associates showed that it could indeed be achieved. Because of the very low probability of such (Raman) scattering, extremely intense and
monochromatic (single wavelength) sources of light such as mercury arc lamps
with appropriate filters to produce nearly monochromatic light needed to be
used. The spectrum of the scattered
radiation could be produced with a prism spectroscope and photographed with
very long exposure times, yielding some extremely faint wavelength shifted
spectral lines, in addition to a highly intense unmodified spectral line
corresponding to the wavelength of the incident radiation. The wavelength shift and the nature of the
Raman scattered radiation depends on the nature and physical properties of the
molecules of the material and can be determined through appropriate measurements. The earliest experiments were done with clear
liquids such as carbon tetrachloride, but later extended to transparent solids
and gases as well. The intensities and
wavelengths of the scattered lines varied greatly, but the lines corresponding to loss of photon energy were
always more intense than those corresponding to a gain in energy.
Here is a picture of
the spectrograph used by Raman and his team, exhibited prominently and proudly
in IACS, whose old headquarters as well as the present one are also shown in
the next picture.
When Raman confirmed
the discovery he realized that what he had found was the optical analogue of a
very similar process taking place with X-ray photons discovered earlier and
known as the Compton Effect.
Significantly, the discoverer, Arthur H Compton of USA, had been awarded
the Nobel Physics Prize just a year before.
Rejuvenation of Raman Effect
Despite the
tremendous importance of the process, Raman scattering experiments and
applications went into hiatus for want of monochrormatic light sources strong
enough to produce significant results. Raman’s
research interests drifted away to other, more promising, areas where he made
very valuable contributions, and stayed that way till the rest of his
productive life. But the invention of
the LASER which made possible tremendously high intensity coherent sources of
radiation in the sixties changed the scenario dramatically, though by then it
was too late for Raman to re-enter the field.
Laser Raman
scattering became one of the most useful and productive techniques in
scientific research and has remained so even now. If anything, its importance and usefulness as
an analytical tool for scientific and industrial applications has grown even
more, with the development of portable and low cost Raman spectrometers
employing the vastly more efficient ‘surface enhanced Raman scattering
technique’, flexible fibre optic probes, integrated CCD video detectors and
dedicated microprocessors for real time data acquisition and analysis. The following picture shows one such ultra-compact commercial device:
Raman the Man
The following short
statement by Dr Subodh Mahanti of Vigyan
Prasar sums up Raman’s human side succinctly: “Raman was a very simple man.
He was also a supreme egotist. But then in private conversation he often showed
utmost humility. He was a man of
emotion. He never bothered to suppress
his feelings. He could get violently
angry. He hurt many. He feared no authority. On some occasions he publicly wept like a
child. Raman had ‘all-too-human’
drawbacks in abundance. But then he was
an excellent physicist and totally devoted to the pursuit of science.”
Few people ever seem
to have seen Raman without his trade-mark turban and ill-fitting suit. The former is seen as a symbol of his
orthodoxy. He was also a pure vegetarian
and teetotaler. He had a refined sense of humour, one of the best
illustrations of which was his purported remark
at the Nobel Prize after-dinner ceremony, “Ladies and gentlemen, you
may all know the Raman effect on alcohol, but don’t try to find out the effect
of alcohol on Raman.”
Raman was also a
staunch nationalist. His following
remarks relating to the Nobel award ceremony are very significant: “When I sat
in that crowded hall and saw the sea of western faces surrounding me, and I,
the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was
really representing my people and my country.
… When I turned round and saw the British Union Jack under which I had
been sitting, I realized that my poor country, India, did not even have a flag
of her own – it was this that triggered off my complete breakdown.”
It is interesting to
note that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the great astrophysicist and Nobel
Laureate, did not have any great
admiration for his uncle C V Raman and did not opt to work under his tutelage
before he left India for greener pastures abroad. He also thought that K S Krishnan, Raman’s
best known associate at Calcutta, did not receive adequate credit for his
contributions that resulted in the discovery of the Raman Effect. In Chandrasekhar’s own words, “Much of Raman's
work relating to the discovery of the Raman Effect was carried out in
collaboration with K S Krishnan. But
unfortunately, Raman and Krishnan fell out in the late forties and they became
estranged. It is a very unpleasant and
unfortunate story.” This certainly
doesn’t imply that Krishnan deserved to share the Nobel award with Raman as has
been made out by some distractors of the latter.
A Memorable Encounter
As a student of the Physics
honours course at the Central College, Bangalore during 1956-59, I was as keen
as my fellow classmates in meeting C V Raman and listening to him. One day some
of us had the audacity to visit him at his institute and invite him to our
department for a special lecture. As
soon as he heard our words, he flew into a violent rage, asked us to get out of
his sight at once and virtually chased us out of the building. Perplexed and deeply hurt at such a reception
from someone we had all adored for his achievements, we were about to make a
hasty retreat when he called us back in a commanding voice, regained his
composure, put us at ease and explained why he had reacted so irritably. Apparently, he had a grudge against the
college and the thought of visiting it at the request of a bunch of
irresponsible students was too much for him.
His temper cooled swiftly and he offered us a very reasonable compromise
– that we should all visit him at his institute to hear a special lecture
from him. This was even better than what
we had bargained for and, on the appointed day when all of us trooped in and awaited
his presence in his spacious lecture hall, he gave us a masterly exposition of
the theory of specific heats of solids, especially including his own recent
contributions to it. In doing so, he castigated the work of the great German
physicist Max Born, whom he had strongly patronized earlier at IISc, as well as others who had preceded both. To us it was a first-hand exposure to his
complex and unpredictable personality to which Ramaseshan has alluded so
frequently in his biography.
At the end of his
talk, I had the temerity born mainly out
of ignorance and half-baked ideas to ask him if his theory was in any way
connected with the famous Raman Effect.
I was too frozen stiff to understand his answer, but I do remember it
was a patient, condescending and considerate one, making no mention of its
irrelevance. This was the other face of
the great man. Incidentally, Raman’s
theory of specific heats was quickly dumped into the dustbin of history, a fate
that befalls almost all great scientists sometime or other in their lives.
Subsequently, I had
the opportunity to hear Raman’s lectures on two different occasions, once in
my own city of Mysore to a packed gathering in the Maharaja/Yuvraja college
complex. Though few in the audience really understood the contents, everybody
had been mesmerized by his imposing personality. It was not a particularly healthy sign for
cultivating good science.
Working at RRI
As recounted
elsewhere in my blog, I had the privilege of being attached to the Raman
Research Institute during 1977-80 to pursue my doctoral work under the guidance
of Prof S Chandrasekhar FRS, another nephew of C V Raman. This gave me a ring side view of the institution
that Raman had built up after his retirement from the Indian Institute of
Science, Bangalore in 1948. I could
learn a great deal about Raman and his personality, including his love-hate
relationships with other people, from distinguished
former students and assistants at the institute. The museum of collections of butterflies,
minerals, and expensive gems and precious stones he had built up was a notable
sight in the RRI campus. For good
measure, I could actually lay my hands on his Nobel gold medallion and
certificate of award, one of only two such repositories in the whole of the
country.
Most lay visitors to
RRI in those days invariably asked to see the Raman Spectrometer and were
disappointed to learn that RRI didn’t have any such instrument, not even the
one with which Raman had done his pioneering work, which is actually displayed
at the IACS Kolkata. Soon the situation
was to change. As part of my work on the
study of the vibrational spectral characteristics of aligned liquid crystalline
molecules, I needed to build and use a laser raman spectrometer at the Liquid
Crystals Laboratory of RRI. Prof
Chandrasekhar had obtained a discarded traditional raman spectrometer built
around a very good double reflection grating monochromator as a gift from
abroad and I cannibalized it to isolate the monochromator and convert it to a
laser Raman spectrometer using an existing powerful He-Ne laser souce, an
imported photon counting system and some auxiliary equipment. This not only served my purpose but also
became a much needed show piece for the institution. The excitement and thrill I derived from
obtaining the first laser Raman spectrum of a liquid crystalline sample at RRI
is permanently etched in my memory. The
success of my endeavour also provided me some bragging rights, not to speak of
the blogging rights I am now indulging in.
28Feb78
To commemorate the
50th anniversary of the discovery of the Raman Effect, RRI had organized an
international conference on Raman scattering and related topics in 1978. I was
also associated with its organization and logistics to some extent. Many top
notch researchers from abroad had participated, including Dr C K N Patel form
Bell Labs, USA who had invented the highly powerful carbon dioxide laser for
which I thought he deserved a Nobel Prize.
I had the opportunity to meet and talk to many of the distinguished
delegates. As part of the celebrations,
Prof Ramasehan delivered the first C V Raman Memorial Lecture at the Indian
Institute of Science and the subject of his lecture was none other than Raman
himself, his multi-faceted personality and his scientific achievements. He
summed up Raman’s scientific philosophy in these words: “To Raman, scientific
activity was the fulfillment of an inner need.
His approach to science was one of passion, curiosity and
simplicity. It was an attempt to
understand. To him science was based on
independent thought, combined with hard work.
Science was a personal endeavour, an aesthetic pursuit and above all a
joyous experience.”
Here is a picture of
the very impressive main building of RRI more or less as it was when I was
attached to its almost invisible Liquid Crystals Laboratory far to its left. RRI is located quite close to the sprawling
Indian Institute of Science campus.
National Science Day
In 1986, the National Council for
Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC), later renamed Vigyan Prasar, recommended to the
Government of India the designation of February 28 for obvious reasons as the National
Science Day (NSD). The event is now
celebrated all over the country in schools, colleges, universities and other
academic, scientific, technical, medical and research institutions. On the occasion of the first NSD (28 February
1987) NCSTC announced institution of the National Science Popularization awards
for recognizing outstanding efforts in the area of science communication and
popularization.
Conceived as an ‘autonomous’
organization, but fully funded by the central government, Vigyan Prasar’s
primary objective is to promote/nurture a
scientific temper and rational
outlook among all categories of people through a variety of activities,
particularly aimed at making NSD as productive as possible. Considering the sorry status of science and
science education in the country against the backdrop of stifling social
customs and traditions, this is indeed an onerous responsibility, virtually
impossible to achieve to any significant extent. The fact that the organization works like
most government departments further restricts its usefulness. To be more effective, it needs to enlist the
help of dedicated non-governmental voluntary organizations in a very big way
and play an even more proactive role, exercising full functional autonomy and a
much greater commitment to its primary objective. In trying to do so, it also
needs to clearly elucidate for itself, in the context of it’s the primary
objective, what constitutes scientific temper and rational outlook in different
groups of people, including scientists and students of science, and what does
not.
In the last few
years Vigyan Prasar has been centering its efforts around a focal theme,
usually of contemporary interest. Last
year, the theme was appropriately, “Chemistry in Daily Life”, to highlight 2011
as the International Year of Chemistry.
This year the theme has been, “Clean Energy Options and Nuclear Safety”,
partially perhaps to deflect attention from the ongoing agitation against the
Koodankulam nuclear power project. Three
sub-themes have been identified: (i) Nuclear Energy: A Clean, Reliable and Safe
Energy Options, (ii) Alternative Energy for Sustainable Development, and (iii)
Clean Energy Options – Choices for Tomorrow.
Undue importance appears to be given for Essay Writing, Slogan Writing
and On-the-spot Poster Making competitions which are of rather dubious and
superficial productive value, the last two being downright trivial.
Raman had believed
that the only method of promoting science was by doing and living it in the
real day-to-day world and not merely in scientific institutions, laboratories
and universities and was contemptuous of professional organizers of
science. “for such people“ he said, “the
so called organization of science becomes more important than science itself or
its values”. Here is much food for
thought, particularly for Vigyan Prasar.
Regarding public
awareness, there is very little dissemination of concrete information related
to the NSD in the electronic and print media.
Like the numerous national festivals, NSD appears to be degenerating
into yet another ritual in the national calendar.
Postscript
At the professional
level, nobody has served the cause of science in independent India with greater
commitment, conviction and example than C V Raman. But, if the nation has to carry forward the
torch he lighted as well as translate Nehru’s dream of science and science
education as transformational agencies to combat the ills and evils of our
society, a great deal more needs to be done than the merely ritualistic
observation of one day in the year as a special day in the nation’s calendar.
