A trip to England | India Got Its First Scientific Nobel

It was 1921, India was under the rule of the British Empire, during that time a young man got an opportunity to deliver his lecture to the ‘Congress of Universities of the British Empire’ at Oxford and his hosts were pioneers like J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford the man was no one else but Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. On his journey to the United Kingdom, he saw the colour of the Mediterranean Sea from his ship, and Raman asked himself that,

A glass of water has no colour. But a deep-sea with the same water is a brilliant blue. Why is this so?

At that time, scientists believed the sea was blue because it reflects the colour of the sky, but Raman found that it was the water itself that caused blue light to scatter more than other colours in the light. He was so enthusiastic that he began to conduct his experiments on-board using only some simple instruments that he had with him at that time. On his return home, he continued his research till he finally succeeds on February 28, 1928. He called it modified scattered radiation but we knew it as ‘Raman Effect’. In 1930, C.V. Raman became the first person from Asia to be awarded a Nobel Prize in any field of science. The date of the discovery, February 28, is now celebrated as National Science Day in India.

During the same visit, he was taken to see St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Raman became so excited by the whispering-gallery waves there that he performed some experiments and wrote scientific papers about it. Whispering-gallery waves were first explained for the case of St Paul's Cathedral in 1878 by Lord Rayleigh. Raman reported the same concept for Indian whispering galleries like; The Great Gol-Gumbaz at (Bijapur), The Victoria Memorial (then Calcutta), The General Post Office, Kolkata (then Calcutta), and The Granary at Bankipore (Patna) which is now more commonly known by us as the Golghar.

You can read the original manuscripts from here - 1, 2

A bit more, Only for Science Nerds –

Raman completed his secondary and higher secondary education very early at the ages of 11 and 13 and after that he topped the bachelor's degree examination at the University of Madras with honors in physics from Presidency College and won the gold medal only at the age of 16. He published his first research paper, on "Unsymmetrical diffraction bands due to a rectangular aperture" in the British journal (Philosophical Magazine) in 1906 while he was still a graduate student. In the next year, he obtained an M.A. degree. His second paper published in the same journal that year was on the surface tension of liquids. It was alongside Lord Rayleigh's paper on the sensitivity of the ear to sound, and from which Lord Rayleigh started to communicate with Raman, courteously addressing him as "Professor."

Raman was chosen by the University of Calcutta to become the first Palit Professor of Physics in 1914 by Ashutosh Mukherjee. He was a second choice after J C Bose declined to take up the position. Raman's appointment as the Palit Professor was strongly objected to by some members of the Senate of the University of Calcutta, especially foreign members, as Raman had no Ph.D. and had never studied abroad. As a kind of rebuttal Mukherjee arranged for an honorary D.Sc. which the University of Calcutta conferred Raman in 1921. The same year he visited Oxford to deliver a lecture at the Congress of Universities of the British Empire. In 1924 he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1926, he established the Indian Journal of Physics as the first editor. The second volume of this journal published his famous article "A new radiation", reporting the discovery of the Raman Effect. In 1933, Raman left Kolkata to join the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore as its first Indian director. During his tenure at IISc, he recruited G. N. Ramachandran, another Fellow of the Royal Society who later went on to become a distinguished X-ray crystallographer known for his work that led to his creation of the Ramachandran plot for understanding peptide structure. Raman founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1934 and started publishing the proceedings of the academy. Raman retired from the Indian Institute of Science 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.

In 1930, Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, conferred him a Knight Bachelor in a special ceremony at the Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi, from then he is been called Sir C. V. Raman.

He won India’s highest civilian award, Bharat Ratna in 1954 but he smashed it with a hammer when he had a conflict with then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He objected to Nehru’s policy of prioritizing research only in state-owned institutes such as Atomic Research Establishment at Trombay, Mumbai, and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Laboratories, while universities were left to fend for themselves.

A brief about Raman Scattering/Raman Effect –

According to Rayleigh’s scattering principle, scattered light should be elastic in nature as when photons are scattered most of the scattered photons have the same energy (frequency, wavelength, and colour) as the incident photons but different direction.

Raman stated that a smaller fraction of these scattered photons (approximately 1 in 10 million) can be scattered inelastically with the scattered photons having energy different (usually lower) from those of the incident, photons are known as Raman scattered photons and this phenomenon are known as Raman Scattering or Raman Effect. This is because of conservation of energy; the material either gains or loses energy in the process, this phenomenon was reported by Raman as a modified scattered radiation.