We
celebrate worthless things too – we feel so happy when India enters semifinals
of ICC T20WC – today 7th Nov is a great day and we should be hailing
a genius from this motherland .. .. did WE ??
Physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that proved the profoundly strange quantum nature of reality. Their experiments collectively established the existence of a bizarre quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, where two widely separated particles appear to share information despite having no conceivable way of communicating. The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded 116 times to 222 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2022. John Bardeen is the only laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972. This means that a total of 221 individuals have received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Does that strike a chord?
Rhishard Llewellyn Jones (1865 – 1932) was a Welsh professor of physics who worked at the Presidency College Madras and also served as a director of the Madras Observatory. The man of this post was his student ! Jones worked at Dulwich College and joined as a professor of physics at the Presidency College, Madras in 1889. He received an MA in 1893. At Madras he also served as Government Meteorologist from 1899.
In 1902, the man joined Presidency College in Madras where his father had been transferred to teach mathematics and physics. In 1904, he obtained a B.A. degree from the University of Madras, where he stood first and won the gold medals in 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 earned an M.A. degree from the same university with highest distinction in 1907. Aware of his capacity, his physics teacher Rhishard Llewellyn Jones insisted he continue research in England. Sadly, the man was of poor health and was considered as a "weakling." And was considered not healthy enough to withstand the harsh weathers of England.
His was an illustrious family. His father was a Maths & Physics teacher. His elder brother joined the Indian Finance Service (now Indian Audit and Accounts Service), the most prestigious government service in India. In no condition to study abroad, our hero followed suit and qualified for the Indian Finance Service achieving first position in the entrance examination in 1907. He was posted in Calcutta as Assistant Accountant General where he developed acquaintance with Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), the first research institute founded in India in 1876. In 1909, he was transferred to Rangoon, British Burma to take up the position of currency officer. After only a few months, he had to return to Madras as his father died from an illness. He came back and was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and again posted to Calcutta. Not any story of a successful bureaucrat ! - but that of a Great Scientist - Sir C.V. Raman !
C. V.
Raman was born in Tiruchirapalli, to Tamil Brahmin parents, Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer and Parvathi
Ammal. He was the second of eight siblings.
Raman discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wave-length and frequency. This phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light, which they called "modified scattering" was subsequently termed the Raman effect or Raman scattering. Raman received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and was the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in any branch of science.
CV Raman topped the bachelor's degree examination of
the University of Madras with honours in physics from Presidency College at age
16. His first research paper, on diffraction of light, was published in 1906. In
1917, he was appointed the first Palit Professor of Physics by Ashutosh
Mukherjee at the Rajabazar Science College under the University of Calcutta. On
his first trip to Europe, seeing the Mediterranean Sea motivated him to
identify the prevailing explanation for the blue colour of the sea at the time,
namely the reflected Rayleigh-scattered light from the sky, as being incorrect.
He founded the Indian Journal of Physics in 1926. He moved to Bangalore in 1933
to become the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science. He
founded the Indian Academy of Sciences the same year. He established the Raman
Research Institute in 1948 where he worked to his last days.
The Raman effect was discovered on 28 February 1928. The day is celebrated annually by the Government of India as the National Science Day. In 1954, the Government of India honoured him with the first Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award. He later smashed the medallion in protest against Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's policies on scientific research.
Here is something extracted from Nobel Prize web : Prize motivation: “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him”
When light meets particles that are smaller than the light’s wavelength, the light spreads in different directions. This occurs, for example, when light packets—photons—encounter molecules in a gas. In 1928 Venkata Raman discovered that a small portion of the scattered light acquires other wavelengths than that of the original light. This is because some of the incoming photons’ energy can be transferred to a molecule, giving it a higher level of energy. Among other things, the phenomenon is used to analyze different types of material.
.. ..
and did you remember him today .. .. if not, though late, let us celebrate and
remember that great Scientist, Nobel Laureate who brought glory to mother India
7th Nov. 2022
Sir Venkata Raman – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Mon. 7 Nov 2022. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1930/raman/facts/
Pics from twitter.
👍🙏 yes.let us celebrate and remember that great Scientist, Nobel Laureate who brought glory to mother India. Jai hind!
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