C V Raman: the physicist with a Himalayan ego who went to Stockholm convinced hed win a Nobel prize

Most physicists learn they’ve won a Nobel prize after being phoned up by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. But, as Preetish Kakoty discovers, the Indian physicist C V Raman was so convinced he would win in 1930 that he went to Sweden before the news had even been announced

How confident, or perhaps delusional, do you have to be to travel to Stockholm because you’re so certain you’ll be awarded a Nobel prize? Most of us wouldn’t have the time, money or self-belief to go to Sweden and hang out at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the off-chance that we might win. But one person who did just that was the Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata (C V) Raman in 1930.

Back in those days, travelling from India to Sweden wasn’t a case of jumping on a jet plane, but involved a long, two-month journey by sea. So if he wanted to arrive in Stockholm in time for the award ceremony on 10 December 1930, Raman knew he couldn’t wait until the prize was formally announced in mid-November to set sail. In July 1930 he therefore booked passage for himself and his wife, the couple arriving in Stockholm on 9 December of that year.

Raman’s audacity, belief and the arduous journey paid off. He was duly awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him”, namely Raman scattering. In doing so, Raman became the first person from India to win a scientific Nobel prize – the poet, playwright and musician Rabindranath Tagore having previously won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Obsessive nature

Born on 7 November 1888 in the city of Thiruchchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, Raman was a child prodigy, who at 16 came top in physics at the University of Madras and published his first research paper aged just 18. Appointed a professor of physics at the University of Calcutta in 1913, Raman had a long obsession with winning a Nobel prize. In 1924, upon being elected a fellow of the Royal Society, he was asked during the award ceremony what was next in line for him. “The Nobel prize of course!” he replied.

The discovery that bagged Raman the coveted prize in fact began on another sea voyage

The discovery that bagged him the coveted prize in fact began on another sea voyage. In 1921 Raman was travelling back from Southampton to Bombay (now Mumbai) on the SS Narkunda, having taken part in the Second Congress of the Universities of the Empire in Oxford. Rather than lounging on the sun deck or drinking in the bar, Raman spent the 15-day journey examining and analysing the deep blue colours of the Mediterranean, Red and Arabian seas with his pocket Nicol prisms, a small telescope and a diffraction grating.

In fact, Raman did more than just take data. While on board, he wrote up his findings in a short letter that he mailed to the journal Nature while the ship was docked at Aden in Yemen. Published on 20 October 1921, it gives Raman’s address as “SS Narkunda, near Aden” (Nature 108 242). He then wrote another paper to Nature (108 367) titled “The colour of the sea”, this time with the byline “SS Narkunda, Bombay Harbour”.

The spectrum of blue colours of the vast sea fascinated Raman and made him question the previous belief, primarily from the work by Lord Rayleigh, that the colour is simply due to the reflection of the sky – and has nothing to do with the colour of the water itself. Raman challenged this notion in his follow-up Nature paper, which was published on 17 November 1921.

“It was abundantly clear from the observations,” he writes, “that the blue colour of the deep sea is a distinct phenomenon in itself.” Raman believed that light diffracts as it passes through the water and concluded: “An interesting possibility that should be considered is that the diffracting particles may, at least in part, be the molecules of the water themselves.”

This curiosity led him to a series of experiments over the next few years, primarily carried out by his students at Calcutta University, culminating in the discovery that light changes its wavelength and energy when it passes through any material. The change in wavelength and energy, in fact, is a fingerprint of the material itself.

His discovery of what became known as the Raman effect is what eventually won him his most cherished recognition – the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. One of the many applications of Raman’s discovery is Raman spectroscopy, which uses the scattering of laser light to establish the chemical make-up of a material and forms the basis of airport security scanners.

Indian impact

Raman’s Nobel prize was significant not just for the scientific advancements that his discovery enabled, but also for the far-reaching impact it engendered in India, where opposition to the British Raj was gathering speed. In fact, he won the award less than a year after the declaration of Purna Swaraj – complete independence – on 26 January 1930 in a session of the Indian National Congress in Lahore.

For a country reeling under colonial rule and fighting for its identity, Raman’s Nobel prize could not have come at a better time to instil hope and aspirations to millions of people around the country. In fact, he holds the honour of being the first physicist outside western Europe or the US to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Raman was fully aware of the impact that the prize would have in India, where research was far less developed than that enjoyed by his counterparts in, say, Cambridge, Göttingen or Copenhagen. In 1929 he therefore hesitantly wrote a letter to the Danish Nobel-prize-winner Niels Bohr, asking for his “influential support” for the 1930 Nobel prize. The request of such “personal character”, he explained, was only because he believed that Bohr would “sympathize with the scientific aspirations of India”.

Unbeknownst to Raman, Bohr had already nominated him for a Nobel prize in 1929 – that year’s prize going to Louis de Broglie for wave–particle duality – and he did so again in 1930. We now know a total of 10 different people nominated Raman for that year’s prize, including de Broglie as well as Ernest Rutherford and Charles Wilson.

Raman’s research and notoriety led to many students being attracted to Calcutta, with the physics department becoming a centre of world-class research

Raman’s research and notoriety led to many students being attracted to Calcutta (now Kolkata), with the physics department becoming a centre of world-class research despite its small size and the lack of an established scientific culture and infrastructure in India. Other leading physicists to have worked there include the astrophysicist Meghnad Saha and the theorist Satyendra Nath Bose in what some have touted as a “golden era” for Indian science.

Sadly, it ended prematurely a few years after Raman’s Nobel prize due to conflicts between these three leading scientists. This was partly due to parochialism and partly, as his biographer, the condensed-matter physicist Ganeshan Venkataraman famously put it, Raman’s “Himalayan ego and sharp tongue”.

Moving on

In 1933 Raman left Calcutta, becoming the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc, earlier the Tata Institute of Science) in Bangalore (now Bengaluru). Rutherford, when asked by the institute’s council as to who should replace the outgoing director Martin Forster, had made it clear there was no need to seek directors in Britain when India had a “distinguished candidate in the shape of Raman”.

In 1934 he went on to found the Indian Academy of Science, which was significant in that it provided a way for researchers across the country to communicate and discuss research findings. Just as important, however, was the fact that membership of the academy was reserved exclusively for Indian scientists, effectively signalling an act of rebellion against the British.

Raman’s time at the IISc was controversial. On one occasion, he turned down the application for a research fellowship by a female student – the biochemist Kamala Sohonie – because he believed women were not competent to conduct research. Raman reversed his decision, albeit with humiliating conditions, after Sohonie staged a Gandhian-style protest (Satyagraha) outside his office.

Within three years, Raman was forced to resign from the directorship following a fallout with the council, primarily for allegations of bias towards physics research and overshadowing other areas of research of the institute. He remained a professor at the IISc until retiring in 1948. Later that year, he founded the Raman Research Institute with which he was actively involved until his death in 1970 at the age of 82.

Raman’s legacy

Despite his controversial past, Raman is still the flag-bearer of Indian physics, owing to the Nobel prize and the global recognition he enjoyed. India holds a National Science Day every year on 28 February to mark the occasion in 1928 when Raman and his associate Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnanannounced their discovery of Raman scattering to the media. The work was reported in newspapers on 29 February and was formally published on 31 March 1928 in a paper entitled “A new type of secondary radiation” (Nature 121 502 ).

Almost a century on from his success, however, India has not yet produced another home-grown Nobel-prize-winning physicist. Raman’s nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar did share the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with William Fowler for his work on the evolution of stars, but he was based in the UK and then the US when the work for which he was recognized was carried out.

Raman’s divisive personality and sharp opinions turned more people against him than his ingenuity and scientific legacy ever won over

Sadly, Raman’s divisive personality and sharp opinions turned more people against him than his ingenuity and scientific legacy ever won over. His obsession with global recognition can be sensed from his reaction upon first receiving news of his Nobel prize, which came while he was en route to Stockholm. Learning of the award from his Calcutta collaborator Suri Bhagavantam, Raman’s first reaction was to ask if he was the sole awardee or whether he was to “share the bed with other strangers”.

Given his “Himalayan ego”, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Raman decided to travel to Stockholm on a whim. We do not have any documentation about what he thought or did on that two-month voyage. But for him, at least, it was a journey that was not wasted.

• Find out more from Preetish Kakoty about C V Raman’s life on the Physics World Weekly podcast.