Brief Biography Of Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944)

 

Prafulla Chandra Ray  (1861-1944) was born on 2  August 1861 in Raruli-Katipara, a village in the District of Khulna (in present day Bangladesh). His early education started in his village school. He often played truant and spent his time resting comfortably on the branch of a tree, hidden under its leaves.   After attending the village school, he went to Kolkata, where he studied at Hare School and the Metropolitan College.  The lectures of  Alexander Pedler in the Presidency College, which he used to attend, attracted him to chemistry, although his first love was literature. He continued to take interest in literature, and taught himself Latin and French at home.  After obtaining a F.A. diploma from the University of Calcutta, he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh on a Gilchrist scholarship where he obtained both his B.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees. In 1888, Prafulla Chandra made his journey home to India. Initially he spent a year working with his famous friend Jagadish Chandra Bose in his laboratory. In 1889, Prafulla Chandra was appointed an  Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the Presidency College, Kolkata. His publications on mercurous nitrite and its derivatives brought him recognition from all over the world. Equally important was his role as a teacher - he inspired a generation of young chemists in India thereby building up an Indian school of chemistry.  Famous Indian scientists like Meghnad Saha and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar were among his students. Prafulla Chandra believed that the progress of India could be achieved only by industrialization. He set up the first chemical factory in India, with very minimal resources, working from his home. In 1901, this pioneering effort resulted in the formation of the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical  Works Ltd. He retired from the Presidency College in 1916, and was appointed as Professor of Chemistry at the University Science College. In 1921 when Prafulla Chandra reached 60 years, he donated, in advance, all his salary for the rest of his service in the University to the development of the Department of Chemistry and to the creation of two research fellowships.  The value of this endowment was about two lakh rupees. He eventually retired at the age of 75. In Prafulla Chandra Ray, the qualities of both a scientist and an industrial entrepreneur were combined and he can be thought of as the father of the Indian Pharmaceutical industry.

Brief Biography Of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937)

 

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was born on 30 November 1858, in Myemsingh, Faridpur, a part of the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He is regarded as India's first modern scientist. Jagdish Chandra Bose was an Indian physicist who pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics. He attended the village school till he was 11. He then moved to Kolkata where he enrolled in St. Xavier’s. He was very much interested in Biology. However, Father Lafont, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great interest in Physics. Having obtained his B.A. in physical sciences, twenty two year old Bose left for London, to obtain a medical degree. However, he kept falling ill and had to discontinue his plans to be a doctor. He then obtained his B.A. degree from Christ College, Cambridge. He returned to India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an  Assistant Professor of Physics, where he remained till 1915.  There was a peculiar practice in the college at that time.  The Indian teachers in the college were paid one third of what the British teachers were paid! So Bose refused his salary but worked for three years.  The fourth year he was paid in full! He was an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in class. Some of his students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists themselves. During this period, Bose also started doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves, carrying out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization. He developed the use of galena crystals for making receivers, both for short wavelength radio waves and for  white and ultraviolet light. In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated wireless communication using radio waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. Many of the microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn antennas, polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic radiation - were invented and used by Bose in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He also suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which was confirmed in 1944. Bose then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He showed that not only animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response under different kinds of stimuli – mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical. Bose was knighted in 1917 and soon thereafter elected Fellow of the Royal Society, London, (both as physicist and biologist!). Bose had worked all along without the right kind of scientific instruments and laboratory. For a long time he had been thinking of building a laboratory.  The result was the establishment of the Bose Research Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a famous centre of research in basic sciences.

Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018, the same date Albert Einstein was born in 1879

What is Raman Effect? The discovery that India celebrates with National Science Day

India celebrates National Science Day every year on 28 February. The theme this year is Women in Science.

India celebrates National Science Day on 28 February every year in honour of physicist C.V. Raman’s discovery of the Raman Effect, which gave Asia its first Nobel in the Sciences in 1930.

Raman and his student-collaborator K.S. Krishnan made the discovery of the phenomenon in 1928. But Raman’s Nobel win came two years later. It was the first Nobel to a non-white person, and for an Indian scientist.

As India celebrates another year of the physicist’s discovery, ThePrint details the science behind it.

The Raman Effect

In 1921, C.V. Raman was on a trip to Europe when he noticed the striking blue colour of some icebergs and the Mediterranean Sea. He was inspired to want to understand the reason behind the phenomenon.

He conducted experiments with transparent blocks of ice and light from a mercury arc lamp. He recorded the spectra from shining the light through ice and detected what would come to be known as the Raman Lines, caused by the Raman Effect.

The Raman Effect is the process of scattering of light particles by molecules of a medium. The scattering occurs due to a change in the wavelength of light as it enters the medium. When a beam of light travels through a dust-free, transparent chemical, a small fraction of the light emerges in directions other than where it should.

Light consists of particles called photons, whose energy is directly proportional to the frequency with which they travel. When they strike molecules in a medium at high speeds, they bounce back and scatter in different directions depending on the angle with which they hit the molecules.

Most of these scatterings are elastic — the photons retain their energy and are deflected with the same speed as they were traveling with.

However, once in a while, the molecules of the medium light passes through absorb or give energy to photons that strike them. The light particles then bounce with decreased or increased energy, and thus, frequency.

When frequency shifts, so does wavelength.

This means that light refracted from a body, like the Mediterranean Sea or an iceberg, can appear to be of a different colour.

The effect is extremely negligible when measured and occurs in very low amounts, but each medium contains a specific molecular scattering signature, related to the particular molecule and its numbers.

This gave birth to the field of Raman spectroscopy, which has extensive applications around the globe, and across fields. It can help in determining chemical bonding structures, characterise materials, determine temperature, find out crystalline orientation, identify pharmaceutical chemicals, discover counterfeit drugs, identify pigments in old paintings and historical documents, and detect explosives using lasers from a distance.

Raman and Krishnan’s work was expected to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928, and the next year, but didn’t until 1930. Raman won solely; Krishnan didn’t share the award, although his name was given an honourable mention.

This gave birth to the field of Raman spectroscopy, which has extensive applications around the globe, and across fields. It can help in determining chemical bonding structures, characterise materials, determine temperature, find out crystalline orientation, identify pharmaceutical chemicals, discover counterfeit drugs, identify pigments in old paintings and historical documents, and detect explosives using lasers from a distance.

Raman and Krishnan’s work was expected to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928, and the next year, but didn’t until 1930. Raman won solely; Krishnan didn’t share the award, although his name was given an honourable mention.

Soviet physicists Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam observed the effect in crystals just a week before Raman did, but Raman published his results first. The duo also ended up citing Raman in their study, and thus weren’t recognised as the original discoverers of the effect.

National Science Day

In 1986, the Indian government instituted the National Science Day on 28 February, to be celebrated annually in academic and scientific institutions of all levels. The celebrations include public speeches, TV programmes, science exhibitions, and science popularisation awards.

Every year, the day is celebrated with different themes to raise awareness about the importance of science in everyday life. The themes have ranged from waste management to information technology to GM crops. This year’s theme is ‘Women in Science’.

Nobel prize winner in Physics

Jonhn Bardeen

 Nobel prize winner in Physics

    John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23, 1908, son of Dr. Charles R. Bardeen, and Althea Harmer. Dr. Bardeen was Professor of Anatomy, and Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After the death of Althea, when John was about twelve years old, Dr. Bardeen married Ruth Hames, now Mrs. Kenelm McCauley, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

John Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, in which much extra work was taken in mathematics and physics. After being out for a term while working in the engineering department of the Western Electric Company at Chicago, he graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1928. He continued on at Wisconsin as a graduate research assistant in electrical engineering for two years, working on mathematical problems in applied geophysics and on radiation from antennas. It was during this period that he got his first introduction to quantum theory from Professor J.H. Van Vleck.

Professor Leo J. Peters, under whom the research in geophysics was done, took a position at the Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Bardeen followed him there and worked during the next three years (1930-1933) on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. This was a stimulating period in which geophysical methods were first being applied to prospecting for oil.

Because he felt his interests were more in pure than in applied science, Bardeen resigned his position at Gulf in 1933 to take graduate work in mathematical physics at Princeton University. It was here under the leadership of Professor E.P. Wigner, that he first became interested in solid state physics. Before completing his thesis (on the theory of the work function of metals) he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent there the next three years, 1935-1938, working with Professors Van Vleck and Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. The Ph.D. degree at Princeton was awarded in 1936.

From 1938-1941, Bardeen was an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota and from 1941-1945 a civilian physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Work done during the war was on influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and mine-sweeping. After the war, in late 1945, he joined the solid state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and remained there until 1951, when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois. Since 1959 he has also been a member of the Center for Advanced Study of the University.

Main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L.N. Cooper and J.R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity. Much of his research effort since that time has been devoted to further extensions and applications of the theory.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has been (1954-1957) a member of its Council, and on the Editorial Board of The Physical Review and Reviews of Modern Physics. From 1959-1962, he served as a member of the United States President’s Science Advisory Committee.

Bardeen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1954. Honours include the Stuart Ballentine Medal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia (1952) and the John Scott Medal of the City of Philadelphia (1955), both awarded jointly with Dr. W.H. Brattain, the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1955) and D.Sc. (Hon.) from Union College and from the University of Wisconsin. He received the Fritz London Award for work in low temperature physics in 1962.

Bardeen married Jane Maxwell in 1938. They have three children, James Maxwell, William Allen and Elizabeth Ann.

Aryabhatta The Indian Mathematician

Aryabhatta The Indian Mathematician

Mention of rotation of the earth on its axis by Aryabhatta

Aryabhatta

Aryabhatta, also known as Aryabhatta I or Aryabhata (476-550?), was a famous Indian mathematician and astronomer, born in a place called Taregana, in Bihar  (though some people do not agree with the evidence). Taregana (also spelled as Taragna) which literally means songs of stars in Bihari, is a small place situated nearly 30 km from Patna, which was then known as Kusumpura later Pataliputra, the capital of the Gupta Empire. This is the very empire that has been dubbed as the “golden period in Indian history”. The best introduction to the genius of past is seen in the words of Bhaskara I who said, “Aryabhatta is the master who, after reaching the furthest shores and plumbing the inmost depths of the sea of ultimate knowledge of mathematics, kinematics and spherics, handed over the three sciences to the learned world”.

Varahamihira, the younger contemporary of Aryabhatta also mentions him as “Aryabhata”. In addition to this, Bhaskara I too mentions him as Aryabhata. It seems as if the correct name was Aryabhata and not Aryabhatta. This could mean that “Bhatta” was not his surname but as part of his first name. In fact, there is a lot of confusion about his name too. Perhaps he was called Arya and his surname was Bhat or Bhatta!

There is some disagreement about this birth place. Some are of the view that he was born in Patliputra while some are of the view that he was born in Kerala and moved to Patliputra and lived there. Those who say that he was in Bihar is because of this name. His name “Arya” and “Bhatta” indicates that he was from North India. His suffix “Bhatta” could have been either part of his name or his surname, till date it’s not known if this is correct or not. It is interesting to note that Aryabhatta himself have mentioned himself at only 3 places and as “Aryabhata” in his work Aryabhatiya.There is some disagreement about this birth place. Some are of the view that he was born in Patliputra while some are of the view that he was born in Kerala and moved to Patliputra and lived there. Those who say that he was in Bihar is because of this name. His name “Arya” and “Bhatta” indicates that he was from North India. His suffix “Bhatta” could have been either part of his name or his surname, till date it’s not known if this is correct or not. It is interesting to note that Aryabhatta himself have mentioned himself at only 3 places and as “Aryabhata” in his work Aryabhatiya.

Aryabhatta, the Indian mathematician head of Nalanda University at Kusumpura (modern Patna)

The reason for not considering Kerala as his birthplace is that nowhere in his works he has mentioned Kerala. In addition, all works of Aryabhatta is in Sanskrit and Sanskrit was not used in Kerala. So to claim that Aryabhatiya was written in Kerala has no credibility. Furthermore, he has been identified by numerous mathematicians and in Arabic translations as someone who hailed from Kusumpura (modern Patna), the capital of Magadha. It therefore appears that Aryabhatta was born, lived, flourished and worked in Magadha. He has also been described as the head of the Nalanda University.

Aryabhatta mentions himself as Aryabhata

Influence of Aryabhatta on science and mathematicsAryabhatta is considered to be one of the mathematicians who changed the course of mathematics and astronomy to a great extent. He is known to have considerable influence on Arabic science world too, where he is referred to as Arjehir. His notable contributions to the world of science and mathematics includes the theory that the earth rotates on its axis, explanations of the solar and lunar eclipses, solving of quadratic equations, place value system with zero, and approximation of pie (π).

The Value Of Pi

Circle view of pi value

Aryabhatta approximatted pi

Aryabhatta exerted influence on the Indian astronomical tradition to such an extent that his presence was felt in neighboring countries and cultures also. 

The Famous Scientists And His contribution For The World

The Famous Scientists And His contribution For The World

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi was an Italian-American Physicist who created the world’s first nuclear reactor. He is widely known as the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb.” He won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment. He also made significant contributions in the field of quantum theory, statistical mechanics and nuclear and particle physics.

Photon, also known as light quantum is a minute energy packet of electromagnetic radiation. This concept originated in Albert Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect, in which he proposed the existence of discrete energy packets during the transmission of light. Albert Einstein was best known for his General and Special theory of relativity and the concept of mass-energy equivalence which is best known from the equation E = mc².

 

 

As discussed before, Rutherford described an atom as consisting of a positive centre mass surrounded by orbiting electrons. Neil Bohr suspected that electrons revolved in quantised orbits. Having suspected this, Bohr worked on Rutherford’s model and proved that it wasn’t possible for electrons to occupy just any energy level.

 

 

Thomas Edison made a lot of inventions and discoveries. Here, we have listed a few noteworthy ones:
• Invented the carbon rheostat
• Discovered incandescent light
• Invented the motion picture camera
• Invented the fluorescent electric lamp
• Discovered Thermionic Emission
Edison has been described as “America’s greatest inventor.” He developed many devices in fields like mass communication and electric power generation. He was one of the pioneers in applying the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees.



Issac Newton’s discoveries created a launch pad for future developments in science. His most noteworthy discoveries were as follows:
• Newton’s three laws of motion set the foundation for modern classical mechanics.
• The discovery of gravitational force gave us the ability to predict the movement of heavenly bodies .
• His discovery of the calculus gave us a potent mathematical tool, aiding the precise analytical treatment of the physical world.
Issac Newton is one of the greatest mathematician and physicist of all time and his inventions and discoveries widened the reaches of human thoughts.