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C. V. Raman and Colonial Physics: Acoustics and the Quantum

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Abstract

Presenting the social and historical context of Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, this paper clarifies the nature and development of his work in early twentieth-century colonial India. Raman’s early fascination with acoustics became the basis of his later insights into the nature of the light quantum. His work on light scattering played an important role in the experimental verification of quantum mechanics. In general, Raman’s worldview corrects certain Orientalist stereotypes about scientific practice in Asia.

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Notes

  1. A Bengali term denoting a well-mannered and educated man.

  2. Comparable to receiving first-class honours in Britain at that time.

  3. Female analogue of a bhadralok.

  4. Approaching the critical point in a phase transition, such as between gas and liquid states, the sizes of the gas and liquid regions begin to fluctuate; when the density fluctuations become comparable to the wavelength of impinging light, incoming light is scattered and the previously transparent fluid appears cloudy (opalescent).

  5. Note that the usage of the word “coherent” in the 1920s was slightly different than the current use of the term, which refers more specifically to phase coherence.

  6. By regionalism is meant the regional prioritizing of ideas and agency, which is not racial or religious in this context but more in the line of lobbying for recognition in a regionally dependent way.

  7. A north Indian city also called Benaras on the banks of the river Ganges.

References

  1. C.V. Raman, New Physics: Talks on Aspects of Science. (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1951), 135–142.

  2. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1930/, accessed on January 10, 2012.

  3. Rajinder Singh, “C. V. Raman and the Discovery of the Raman Effect,” Physics in Perspective 4 (2002), 399–420

  4. Peter Debye, “Die Konstitution des Wasserstoff-molekuls,” Sitzungsberichte der mathematisch-physikalischen Klasse der Königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München (1915), 1–26. See also, Paul Drude, Lehrbuch der Optik (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1900), English transl.: The Theory of Optics. trans. C. R. Mann and R. A. Millikan (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902); Arnold Sommerfeld, “Die Drudesche Dispersionstheorie vom Standpunkte des Bohrschen Modelles und die Konstitution von H2, O2, and N2,” Annalen der Physik 53 (1917), 497–550; K. F. Herzfeld, “Versuch einer quantenhaften Deutung der Dispersion,” Zeitschrift für Physik 23 (1924), 341–360; A. Smekal, “Zur Quantentheorie der Dispersion,” Die Naturwissenschaften 11 (1923), 873–875; R. Ladenburg, “Die quantentheoretische Dispersionsformel und ihre experimentelle Prüfung,” Die Naturwissenschaften 14 (1926), 1208–1213; F. Reiche, and W. Thomas “Uber die Zahl der Dispersionselektronen, die einem station¨aren Zustand zugeordnet sind,” Zeitschrift für Physik 34 (1925), 510–525; H. A. Kramers, and W. Heisenberg, “Über die Streuung von Strahlung durch Atome,” Zeitschrift für Physik 31 (1925) 681–707, translated in B. L. van der Waerden, ed., Sources of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1968), 223–252.

  5. G. Venkataraman, Journey into Light: Life and Science of C. V Raman (New Delhi: Penguin Books India Ltd., 1986); S. Ramaseshan, C. V. Raman: A Pictorial Biography. (Bangalore: The Indian Academy of Sciences, 1988); Singh, “Raman and the Discovery of the Raman Effect” (ref. 3); Uma Parameswaran C. V. Raman: A Biography (New Delhi: Penguin Books 2011).

  6. Pratik Chakrabarty, Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2004), 180–210. Chakrabarty argues that science and nationalism blended into a single project in early twentieth-century India, especially as seen in the works of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was a mentor of Raman in Calcutta.

  7. Venkataraman, Journey into Light (ref. 5), 3.

  8. C. V. Raman, “Unsymmetrical Diffraction Bands Due to a Rectangular Aperture,” Philosophical Magazine 12, no. 6 (1906), 494–498.

  9. Ibid.

  10. IACS Archives (see http://hdl.handle.net/10821/405, accessed April 26, 2014). Sircar also established the Calcutta Journal of Medicine in 1868 and was an influential populariser of Indian science. See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 59.

  11. Calcutta was the capital of British India from 1772 to 1911, when, because of the revolutionary campaigns in the city, the capital was shifted to Delhi in the north.

  12. A thoroughly revised and corrected edition, rendered conformable to the fourth and last German edition of 1877, with numerous additional notes, and a new additional appendix bringing down information to 1885 especially adapted to the use of musical students. The partition of Bengal did not have any sustained impact on Raman; nothing in the archives shows otherwise. It can be inferred that because Raman was from South India, far from Bengal, his response was not atypical of South Indians.

  13. Raman, Books That Have Influenced Me: A Symposium (Madras: G. A. Natesan & Co., 1947), 21–29.

  14. Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1885), 481–484.

  15. Raman, “The Ectara,” Journal of the Indian Math Club, 1909, 170–175.

  16. Sir Ashutosh Mookherji Silver Jubilee Volume (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1922), 2:179.

  17. Ibid., 180–185.

  18. http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm, accessed December 5, 2011.

  19. Venkataraman, Journey into Light (ref. 5), 6.

  20. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/06/21/stories/2006062107600200.htm, accessed March 5, 2007, the online edition of one of India’s national newspapers, The Hindu. Raman’s behavior can be likened to Gandhi, an Indian nationalist who also used to wear a turban during his stay in South Africa (between 1893 and 1914) as a form of defiance toward the West and colonial authority. See for example Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (New York: Knopf, 2014).

  21. Report of Astronomical Society, April 1913. Parameswaran, Raman (ref. 5), 66.

  22. G. N. Ramachandran, “Professor Raman–The Artist-Scientist,” Current Science 40 (1971), 212.

  23. Singh, “Raman and the discovery of the Raman effect” (ref. 3).

  24. Raman apparently offered three times higher salary than Bose did. See J. C. Bose to D. P. Sarbadhikari, August 30, 1917 (private copy) as quoted in Singh, “Raman and the discovery of the Raman effect” (ref. 3).

  25. Parameswaram, Raman (ref. 5) 80.

  26. Ibid., 94.

  27. IACS online archives http://hdl.handle.net/10821/285, accessed January 6, 2012.

  28. M. N. Saha to P. K. Kichlu, August 15, 1927, Nehru Archives (Saha papers), New Delhi.

  29. D. N. Mallik, “Fermat’s Law,” Bulletin of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science 7 (1913), 14-16.

  30. To keep Hamilton’s Principle and Fermat’s Law consistent, Mallik argued that “we must have for light propagation, TV = Constant,” where T is the kinetic energy and V the potential energy. Calcutta Mathematical Society Archives, Kolkata, Doc B.1913. Raman argued that inside the variational equation δ ∫ (TV) dt = 0 one could add terms like a sin(nt) whose variation was zero and hence showed the non-uniqueness of (TV).

  31. Calcutta Mathematical Society Archives, Doc. B.1917.

  32. Raman and Ray, “On the Transmission Colours of Sulphur Suspensions.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A100 (1921), 102–109. The strange reappearance of color was as follows: at first indigo, then blue, blue-green, greenish-yellow, and finally white.

  33. Venkataraman, Journey into Light (ref. 5), 34.

  34. The scattering coefficient was inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength; see for example Rodney Loudon, The Quantum Theory of Light (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 374.

  35. Lord Rayleigh, “Colours of Sea and Sky” in his Scientific Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 5:540.

  36. Raman, “The colour of the sea,” Nature 108 (1921), 367, responding to Rayleigh’s “Colours of Sea and Sky” (ref. 35).

  37. Einstein, “Theorie der Opaleszenz von homogenen Flüssigkeiten und Flüssigkeitsgemischen in der Nähe des kritischen Zustandes.” Annalen der Physik 33 (1910), 1275–1298. Using classical electromagnetic theory, Einstein and Smoluchowski argued that the mean square fluctuation in density (and also the transverse scattering of light) increases near the critical temperature, resulting in critical opalescence.

  38. Raman, “Transparency of Liquids and Colour of the Sea,” Nature 110 (1922), 280.

  39. His collaborators were K. R. Ramanathan (who joined Raman’s lab in December 1921 from South India and made important observations in 1923), Krishnan, Ramdas, Ganesan, Seshagiri Rao, Venkateswaran, Kameswara Rao, Ramakrishsna Rao, and Ramachandra Rao.

  40. Krishnan observed the same effect in scattered light of sixty-five different purified liquids leading to Raman’s observation in glasses in late 1927. See Venkataraman, Journey into Light (ref. 5), 196-198.

  41. Kameshwar Wali, Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 254.

  42. Roger Stuewer, The Compton effect: Turning Point in Physics. (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 223–234. The Compton effect gives a change of wavelength \( \lambda^{'} - \lambda = \frac{h}{{m_{e} c}}(1 - \cos \theta ) \) where h is Planck’s constant, c the speed of light, m e is the mass of the electron at rest, θ is the scattering angle.

  43. Ibid., 249–273.

  44. Ibid., 268–269.

  45. Ibid., 268. Several physicists accepted the Compton effect, but were just as happy to consider light as waves. For the relevance of this in the development of matrix mechanics see Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen, “On the Verge of Umdeutung: John Van Vleck and the Correspondence Principle,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 61 (2007), 553–624.

  46. Raman, “A Classical Derivation of the Raman Effect.” Indian Journal of Physics 3 (1929), 357–369.

  47. Marjorie Johnston, ed., The Cosmos of Arthur Holly Compton (New York: Knopf, 1967), 37. This is a valuable resource that contains Compton’s “Personal Reminiscences,” a selection of his writings on scientific and non-scientific subjects, and a bibliography of his scientific writings.

  48. C. V. Raman, “A new radiation,” Indian Journal of Physics 2 (1928), 387–398.

  49. Quoted by P. R. Pisharoty in C. V. Raman (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1982), 40-44.

  50. D. C. V. Mallik and S. Chatterjee, Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan: His Life and Work (Hyderabad: Universities Press, 2011), 81.

  51. Adolf Smekal, “Zur Quantentheorie der Dispersion,” Die Naturwissenschaften 11 (1923), 873–875.

  52. Figure 6 also illustrates that the Stokes and anti-Stokes lines are equally displaced from the Rayleigh line because in both cases one vibrational quantum of energy is gained or lost.

  53. The announcement was in the Associated Press of India; RRI Archives Digital Repository, Bangalore, http://hdl.handle.net/2289/3430, accessed October 4, 2012.

  54. G. H. Keswani, Raman and His Effect, (New Delhi: National Book Trust 1980), 44.

  55. RRI Archives Digital Repository, Bangalore, http://hdl.handle.net/2289/3430, accessed October 4, 2012.

  56. Ibid., 396.

  57. See Niels Bohr, “I. On the constitution of atoms and molecules,” Philosophical Magazine 26 (1913), 1–25.

  58. Singh, “Raman and the Discovery of the Raman Effect” (ref. 3), 409.

  59. Abha Sur, “Aesthetics, Authority, and Control in an Indian Laboratory: The Raman-Born Controversy on Lattice Dynamics,” Isis 90 (1999), 25–49.

  60. In a 1980 videotaped lecture at Harvard entitled “The Crisis of the Old Quantum Theory, 1922–25,” Thomas Kuhn remarked about the Kramers-Heisenberg paper and their treatment of the Smekal-Raman incoherent scattering terms that “you get what you would now recognize as cross-products terms in a matrix expansion and that is what inspired matrix mechanics.” I thank Michel Janssen for giving me access to this videotape.

  61. John H. Van Vleck, Quantum Principles and Line Spectra (Washington, DC: National Research Council, Bulletin of the National Research Council 10, Part 4, 1926), as cited in Duncan and Janssen, “On the Verge of Umdeutung” (ref. 45), 623.

  62. C. G. Darwin, “A quantum theory of optical dispersion,” Nature 110 (1922), 841–842.

  63. Herzfeld, “Versuch einer quantenhaften Deutung der Dispersion,” Zeitschrift für Physik 23 (1924), 341–360.

  64. See ref. 61.

  65. Jagadish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory (New York, Berlin: Springer, 2001), 6:354.

  66. Smekal, “Quantentheorie der Dispersion” (ref. 51).

  67. See, for example, K. W. F. Kohlrausch, Der Smekal-Raman-Effekt (Heidelberg: Springer, 1938).

  68. Ramdas was also the first to photograph the scattered spectrum successfully, as noted by R. S. Krishnan and R. K. Shankar, “Raman Effect: History of the Discovery,” Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 10 (1981), 1–8.

  69. L. A. Ramdas, “Raman Effect in Gases and Vapours,” Indian Journal of Physics 3 (1928), 131.

  70. Ladenburg had introduced one of two key ingredients needed for a satisfactory treatment of dispersion in the old quantum theory: the emission and absorption coefficients of Einstein’s quantum theory of radiation. Ladenburg spent most of his career doing experiments on dispersion in gases. See Duncan and Janssen “On the Verge of Umdeutung” (ref. 35).

  71. Erwin Schrödinger, “Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem,” Annalen der Physik 81 (1926), 109–139.

  72. H. A. Kramers and W. Heisenberg, “Über die Streuung von Strahlung durch Atome,” Zeitschrift für Physik 31 (1925), 681–707.

  73. A. G. Shenstone, “Ladenburg, Rudolf Walther” in Charles Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 7:552–556.

  74. Rudolf Ladenburg, “Die quantentheoretische Deutung der Zahl der Dispersionselektronen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 4 (1921), 451–468, translated in van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Mechanics (ref. 4), 139–157. See also Duncan and Janssen, “On the verge of Umdeutung” (ref. 35).

  75. J. H. Van Vleck,“The absorption of radiation by multiply periodic orbits, and its relation to the correspondence principle and the Rayeigh-Jeans law. Part I. Some extensions of the correspondence principle,” Physical Review 24 (1924), 330–346, in van der Waerden, Sources of Quantum Theory (ref. 4), 203–222, at 219, eq. 17.

  76. Francis Low’s introduction to Raman, The New Physics (ref. 1).

  77. IACS archives, Kolkata, Raman Correspondence File.

  78. Singh, “Raman and the Discovery of the Raman Effect” (ref. 3), 14. See also Singh, “Seventy Years Ago: The Discovery of the Raman Effect as Seen From German Physicists,” Current Science 74 (1998), 1112–1115.

  79. Suman Seth, Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 18901926. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Seth argues that, while the physics of principles was concerned with subsuming all physical phenomena under a few abstracted, generalized axioms, deanthropomorphized, dehistoricized, “pure” principles with very few references to experimental data or to the application of the work, the physics of problems as espoused by the Sommerfeld school was characterized by attempting to get a numerical answer that could be compared with real-world engineering problems and extensive experimental data.

  80. Robert Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), 271.

  81. They were trying to elucidate the fine structure of the Rayleigh line induced by modulation of scattered light with Debye thermal waves. See I. L. Fabelinskii, “The discovery of combination scattering of light in Russia and India.” Physics-Uspekhi 46 (2003), 1105–1112.

  82. G. Landsberg and L. Mandelstam, “Eine neue Erscheinung bei der Lichtzerstreuung in Krystallen,” Naturwissenschaften 16 (1928), 557–558. See also Max Born and Emil Wolf, Principles of Optics: Electromagnetic Theory of Propagation, Interference and Diffraction of Light (London: Pergamon Press 1959), 1101.

  83. William Evenson (personal communication) remarks that Mandelstam and Landsberg wanted to reflect on their results as to whether they had any more fundamental implications, as opposed to publishing it very quickly like Raman. To this, the author wants to add that this reflection might have been due to the Russians’ unawareness of the work of Smekal and Kramers-Heisenberg.

  84. I. L. Fabelinskii, “Priority and the Raman Effect,” Nature 343 (1990), 686.

  85. C. G. Darwin, “The Sixth Congress of Russian Physicists,” Nature 122 (1928), 630.

  86. Max Born, “Fourth Russian Physicists Conference,” Naturwissenschaften 16 (1928), 741.

  87. A. Jayaraman and A. K. Ramdas, “Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman,” Physics Today 41, no. 5 (1988), 57–64, on 56.

  88. See http://www.iisc.ernet.in/~currsci/nov10/articles33.htm, accessed May 16, 2007.

  89. IISc Archives; see http://www.iisc.ernet.in/~currsci/nov10/articles33.htm, accessed May 16, 2007.

  90. Rajinder Singh, “Arnold Sommerfeld, The Supporter of Indian Physics in Germany,” Current Science 81 (2001), 1489–1494. Sommerfeld was in the United States for Compton’s discovery and coined the name Compton effect, for what otherwise might have been called the Debye effect or Compton-Debye effect.

  91. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1930/press.html, accessed February 12, 2013.

  92. Arnold Sommerfeld, “Indische Reiseeindrücke,” Zeitwende 5 (1929) 289–298.

  93. Joos to Sommerfeld, May 14, 1928 (Deutsches Museum München). See http://sommerfeld.userweb.mwn.de/PersDat/02201.html, accessed May 2012. This phenomenon of ignoring the scientific works of Indian physicists occurred not only in Germany but in England when Satyendranath Bose sent his paper rederiving Planck’s law from solely quantum theoretical considerations to the Philosophical Magazine, which first ignored it and then rejected it on the grounds of not being sufficiently original. See Somaditya Banerjee, “Bhadralok Physics and the Making of Modern Science in Colonial India,” PhD diss., University of British Columbia (2013).

  94. Singh, “Arnold Sommerfeld” (ref. 90).

  95. Singh and Reiss, "Seventy Year Ago" (ref. 78).

  96. S. Ramaseshan, “The Portrait of a Scientist—C. V. Raman,” Current Science 57 (1988), 1207–1220.

  97. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). See also Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), 163–190.

  98. http://hdl.handle.net/2289/270, accessed April 10, 2014.

  99. Said argues that these stereotypes confirm the necessity of colonial government by asserting the positional superiority of the West over the East. See Said, Orientalism (ref. 97), 35, and Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 74–80. Richard G. Fox, “East of Said” in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader, (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 146–151. The example of “affirmative orientalism” that Fox uses is Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi’s cultural nationalism.

  100. Singh, “Arnold Sommerfeld” (ref. 90), 1489–1494. Not to be confused with Romesh Chandra Majumdar, the eminent Indian historian.

  101. During this time at IISc, Born got into a controversy with Raman over lattice dynamics. For in-depth analysis of the Raman-Born controversy, see Sur, “Aesthetics, Authority and Control” (ref. 59): 25–49.[AU: please give full citation]

  102. Robert Anderson, Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks and Power in India. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  103. Max Born to Ernest Rutherford, October 22, 1936, Ernest Rutherford Papers, Rutherford-Born Correspondence, Add. 7653: B297–B306, Cambridge University Library. See also: Sur, “Aesthetics, Authority, and Control” (ref. 59).

  104. Parameswaran, Raman (ref. 5), 106.

  105. Ibid.

  106. Wali, Chandra (ref. 41), 253.

  107. Singh, “Raman and the Discovery of the Raman Effect” (ref. 3), 1157–1158.

  108. IACS archives Folder 3A: undated document on the birth centenary lecture by Ramaseshan on Raman in 1988 and Silver Jubilee of the Raman Effect held at IACS Calcutta.

  109. Fabelinskii, “The discovery of combination scattering of light” (ref. 81).

  110. Sur, “Aesthetics, Authority, and Control” (ref. 59), 46.

  111. The difference between Raman’s nationalism and that of Bose and Saha can be viewed as part of a larger theme of how Indian nationalism played out regionally, for example in Bengal versus that in South India.

  112. Here I mean there is a distinction between nationalism and anticolonialism, which are subtly different. See Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader, 19861995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 35–44.

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Acknowledgements

I thank David Cassidy, Alexei Kojevnikov, Michel Janssen, Robert Brain, Sean Quinlan, Daniel Kennefick, John Crepeau, Peter Pesic, Robert Crease, and Alexei Pesic for suggestions and comments about this paper and mentoring help in general. Thanks also goes to D. C. V. Mallik, Rajinder Singh, and Meera B. M. at the Raman Research Institute, and Felicity Pors at the Niels Bohr Archive for giving me access to the pictures used here. I acknowledge the support of the Office of Research and Economic Development at the University of Idaho.

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Correspondence to Somaditya Banerjee.

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Somaditya Banerjee is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. He completed his doctorate in History of Science from the University of British Columbia.

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Banerjee, S. C. V. Raman and Colonial Physics: Acoustics and the Quantum. Phys. Perspect. 16, 146–178 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0134-8

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