A government accountant did world-class physics in his spare hours and won a Nobel
C. V. Raman spent years auditing accounts for the colonial finance service while running experiments at night in a Calcutta institute. A sea voyage made him doubt the accepted reason the Mediterranean looks blue. In 1930 his discovery about scattered light made him the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Raman arrived on 7 November 1888 in the town of Tiruchirappalli, the second of eight children of a schoolteacher who earned ten rupees a month; Raman joked that he was born with a copper spoon in his mouth. He raced through school in Visakhapatnam, passing matriculation at 11, and topped the University of Madras BA at 16 with gold medals in physics and English. At 18 he published a paper on diffraction in the Philosophical Magazine, and a later paper caught the eye of Lord Rayleigh, who wrote to him as Professor. A doctor told him his fragile health would not survive England, so he stayed in India.
Instead he topped the Indian Finance Service entrance exam in 1907 and was posted to Calcutta as Assistant Accountant General. There he discovered the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, founded in 1876 but with no research output yet, and got permission to work there at odd hours. His 1907 Nature article on Newton's rings in polarised light became the institute's first paper. Postings to Rangoon and Nagpur interrupted him until 1917, when Ashutosh Mukherjee made him the first Palit Professor of Physics at Calcutta's university.
Sailing to Europe for the first time, he gazed at the Mediterranean and became convinced that the textbook reason for its blueness, skylight bouncing off the surface, was wrong. With his student K. S. Krishnan and a spectrograph of his own design, he found that light passing through a transparent substance partly changes wavelength as it scatters. They announced this modified scattering on 28 February 1928, now India's National Science Day, and the world calls it the Raman effect.
Raman founded the Indian Journal of Physics in 1926, took charge of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru in 1933, the first Indian to lead it, and set up the Raman Research Institute in 1948, where he worked until his death in 1970. His nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar also won a Nobel.
Source: C. V. Raman
