- Lived:
- 7 November 1888, Tiruchirapalli → Visakhapatnam → Madras (Chennai) → Calcutta (Kolkata), 1907–33 → Bangalore (Bengaluru); died there 21 November 1970, aged eighty-two
- Field:
- physics — optics and acoustics; the scattering of light; institution-building and institution-breaking
- The Big Idea:
- Shine light of one pure colour through almost anything, and about one photon in ten million comes out a different colour — shifted by an amount that fingerprints the molecule it struck. Raman found that whisper of changed light in 1928, in a borrowed Calcutta laboratory, and it became one of chemistry's everyday tools.
- In their words:
- "the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea" — the sight, he told the Nobel audience in 1930, that started it all
- If you remember one thing:
- On 28 February 1928 — the date India now keeps as National Science Day — a government accounts officer turned professor, working with equipment he liked to say cost about two hundred rupees, found the effect that won India its first science Nobel. The same man turned a woman away from his institute's door for being a woman, and she out-sat him until he opened it.