C.V. Raman

The Story

On a sea voyage to England in 1921, Raman looked at the Mediterranean and asked a child's question: why is the sea blue? The great physicist Lord Rayleigh had said it merely reflected the sky — but Raman suspected the water itself was scattering the light. He tested it with a simple prism and a bucket of water, and he was right.

On 28 February 1928, Raman announced his discovery: when light passes through a transparent material, a tiny fraction scatters with a changed wavelength, revealing the material's molecular secrets. The 'Raman Effect' became a tool used across physics, chemistry, and biology — even today's hand-held Raman spectrometers descend from it.

The Nobel Prize came in 1930, making Raman the first Asian scientist honoured by Stockholm. He returned to Bhārat and founded the Indian Institute of Science's physics department and the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, where he worked until his death — nurturing a generation of physicists of Bhārat.