Category Physics

Who received India’s first Nobel Prize for physics?

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. CV Raman was India's first physicist to win a Nobel Physics Prize in 1930 “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him".

Nobel Prize-winning Sir CV. Raman is known for his pioneering work in Physics. India celebrates National Science Day on February 28 each year to mark the discovery of the Raman Effect on the day in 1928.

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, also known as C.V. Raman, was a pioneering physicist. Born on November 7, 1888, he was a precocious child, who excelled in Physics during his student days at Presidency College, and later, at the University of Madras. He is best known for his discovery of the Raman Effect, which is a phenomenon of scattering of light that occurs when light passes through a transparent medium. This discovery revolutionised the field of spectroscopy and earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

Raman was born in Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu. He showed an early aptitude for mathematics and science. He graduated from Presidency College in Madras with a degree in Physics and went on to work at the Indian Finance Service. However, he soon realised that his true passion was in Physics and left his job to pursue a career in research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. It was here that he was given an opportunity to mentor research scholars from several universities, including the University of Calcutta.

He was appointed as Director (first Indian) of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1933. In 1947, he was appointed the first National Professor of independent India. He retired from the Indian Institute in 1948. About a year later, he established the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore.

Raman was not only a brilliant scientist, but also a visionary. He believed that science should be accessible to all people, regardless of their background or social status. He was instrumental in the founding of several science institutions. His aim was to encourage the study of science in India.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Raman received many other honours and awards throughout his career. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London in 1924 and was conferred the knighthood by the British government in 1929. He also received numerous awards and honours from the Indian government, including the Bharat Ratna in 1954. India celebrates National Science Day on February 28 each year to mark the discovery of the Raman Effect on the day in 1928.

Raman passed away on November 21, 1970, at the age of 82. He is remembered as one of India's greatest scientists and is still widely celebrated as a pioneer in the field of physics. His legacy continues to inspire young scientists and researchers, who continue to build on his work to expand our understanding of the world around us.

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Who was Maria Montessori?

It was Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori who pioneered the Montessori method of teaching for children.

For over a hundred years, the Montessori Method has been a favoured way of shaping the first learning experiences of young children. And it is all because of the efforts of a pioneering Italian educator, Maria Montessori (1870-1952).

A bright student, Maria had wanted to study medicine but was rejected by the University of Rome because of her gender. It was only after she earned a degree in natural sciences and a recommendation from the Pope that she was grudgingly given admission. During the course, she was not allowed to attend the anatomy class with the other students as it was deemed inappropriate for a woman to see a naked body in the presence of men. So she had to practise her dissections of bodies alone, after class hours.

Nevertheless, she graduated with flying colours, becoming one of the earliest Italian women to receive a medical degree in 1896.

Maria began her career by working with children in mental asylums. She devised new educational methods for them, which were so successful that her students passed the examinations meant for normal children!

In 1907, she opened Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in a slum in Rome, her first chance to see if her methods worked on normal children. She believed that children learned best through doing. She encouraged them to use their five senses to explore their surroundings while playing. She gave them special toys and lessons to develop their innate creativity and imagination.

Maria found that children learned to write before they learned to read. Once, in a class of children who had begun to write a little, she wrote on the blackboard. If you can read this, come up and give me a kiss and waited. Many days passed and then a little girl suddenly went up to her and said, “Here I am!” and kissed her. The children in her schools learnt to read and write by the time they were five years old.

Today Montessori education is followed in over 25,000 schools in more than 140 countries.

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Scientists have achieved the world’s first X-ray signal (or signature) of just one atom

From medical examinations and airport screenings to space missions, X-rays have been used everywhere since its discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. A group of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, have now taken the world's first X-ray signal (or signature) of a single atom. The groundbreaking achievement could revolutionise the way in which scientists detect the materials.

One atom at a time

Before this, the smallest amount one can X-ray a sample is an attogram, which is about 10,000 atoms or more. The paper brought out by the scientists was published in the scientific journal Nature on May 31, 2023 and also made it to the cover of the print edition on June 1. The paper details how physicists and chemists used a purpose-built synchrotron X-ray instrument at the XTIP beamline of Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.

Specialised detector

The team involved picked an iron atom and terbium atom for their demonstration. Both atoms were inserted in respective molecular hosts. Conventional detectors were supplemented with a specialised detector by the research team.

This specialised detector was made of a sharp metal tip. It is positioned at extreme proximity to the sample, enabling it to collect X-ray excited electrons. This technique is known as synchrotron X-ray scanning tunnelling microscopy or SX-STM.

Apart from achieving the X-ray signature of an atom, the team also succeeded in another key goal. This was to employ their technique to find out the environmental effect of a single rare-earth atom.

The scientists were able to detect the chemical states of the individual atoms inside respective molecular hosts and compare them. While the terbium atom, a rare-earth metal, remained rather isolated and didn't change its chemical state, the iron atom interacted with its surrounding strongly.

Many rare-earth materials are used in everyday devices like cell phones, televisions, and computers. This discovery allows scientists to not only identify the type of element, but also its chemical state. Knowing this enables them to work on these materials inside different hosts, paving the way for further advancement of technology.

This team aims to continue to use X-ray to detect properties of a single atom. They are also seeking ways to revolutionise their applications so that they can be put to use in critical materials research.

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What does Hawking’s final theory reveal about the origin of time?

In 1998, physicist Stephen Hawking asked Belgian cosmologist Thomas Hertog to work with him to develop “a new quantum theory of the Big Bang”. What started as a doctoral project for Hertog turned into an intense collaboration that continued until Hawking’s death in 2018. Their answers to the question of how the Big Bang created conditions so perfect for life is what makes the recent book On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory.

In their quest to rethink cosmology from an observers perspective, they had to adopt the strange rules of quantum mechanics that govern the micro-world of atoms and particles. A property called superposition in quantum mechanics suggests that particles can be in several positions at the same time. Only when observed does it randomly pick a specific location. In addition, quantum mechanics also involves random jumps and fluctuations.

Quantum universe

In a quantum universe, therefore, the past and the future emerge from a number of possibilities by continuous observations. These refer to not just the observations done by us human beings, but even the environment or a single particle can “observe”. All other possibilities become irrelevant once something has been observed.

Hawking and Hertog discovered that looking back at the earliest stages of the universe through a quantum lens gave it a more Darwinian flavour of variation and selection. In this deeper level of meta-evolution, even the laws of physics change and evolve in sync with the universe that is taking shape.

Laws evolve

While cosmologists usually start by assuming initial conditions and the laws that existed at the time of the Big Bang, Hawking and Hertog suggest that the laws themselves are a result of evolution. This means that the specific set of physical laws that govern our universe can only be understood in retrospect.

When reasoning back in time, therefore, evolution focussed towards greater simplicity and lesser structure continues all the way. This forms the crux of their hypothesis, meaning that ultimately even time and physical laws would fade away.

The study of the origin of the universe over the last 100 years or so has been against the backdrop of immutable laws of nature. Hawking and Hertog suggest that it isn’t these laws themselves, but their ability to transmute that dictates terms. If future cosmological observations find evidence of this, Hawking’s final theory might well be his greatest scientific legacy.

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Who is Prof. Shiraz Naval Minwalla?

Meet the $100,000 prize winner of the New Horizon Prize in Physics, Prof. Shiraz Naval Minwalla. He is a theoretical physicist who works with string theory and quantum field theory. He is noted for connecting the equations of fluid dynamics and Einstein’s equations of relativity.

He hails from Mumbai. After completing his Masters in Physics from IIT-Kanpur, he went to Princeton University, U.S.A. for his PhD. He was a junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and then served as assistant professor for five years. After that he joined the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai.

He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 2011 and Infosys Prize in Physical sciences in 2013. He also got the TWAS prize in 2016.

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Who is Dr. Anil Bhardwaj?

Dr. Anil Bhardwaj has made significant contributions as an astrophysicist. He serves as the Director of the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, which is a unit of the Department of Space, of the Government of India.

Dr. Anil Bhardwaj received his M.Sc from Lucknow University and PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. He joined ISRO as a scientist at the Space Physics Laboratory (SPL) of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Trivandrum. He rose to become the Director of SPL.

SPL’s research in planetary science was initiated by Dr. Bhardwaj, and he contributed greatly in developing planetary science programs in ISRO. He acted as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the SARA (Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer) experiment on Chandrayaan-1, India’s first Lunar mission. The new findings changed our understanding on the interaction of solar wind with the Moon.

He has played a key role in many space missions of ISRO. He got the ISRO Team Achievement Award for Chandrayaan-1. He has also won the most coveted Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2007) and the Infosys Prize in Physical Sciences (2016).

Dr. Bhardwaj was the editor- in-chief of Advances in Geosciences for seven years, and was among the editors of the European journal Planetary and Space Science, the Bulletin of Astronomical Society of India and Current Science, a journal published by Current Science Association and Indian Academy of Sciences.

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