science & techThe Public Domain Review1921 · Indian Ocean
C. V. Raman showed in 1921 that the sea's blue comes from the water itself, not the sky
In 1921 the Indian physicist C. V. Raman, sailing home from Oxford, found that the deep sea looks blue even when reflected skylight is blocked out. Lord Rayleigh had claimed that the sea's blue was just sky reflected in the water. Raman showed that water scatters blue light much more strongly than other colours, and that the sea looks saturated with blue because the water absorbs the red and other long wavelengths. His later work on scattered light led to the Raman effect, which revealed the quantum nature of light.
Light is scattered when it hits molecules, and shorter blue wavelengths scatter more than longer ones. Water also absorbs red and other long wavelengths more strongly as the light travels through it, so deep water mostly sends back blue light.
This discovery changed how scientists understood the colour of water, showing that the sea's colour is a property of the water itself. The Raman effect later became a standard chemical analysis tool, and it won Raman the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Raman was the first non-Western scientist to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1930.
background
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman ( RAH-muhn; IAST: Candraśēkhara Veṅkaṭarāmaṉ; 7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wavelength. This phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light they called modified scattering, was subsequently termed the Raman effect or Raman scattering. In 1930, Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him" and became the first Asian and non-White person to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.
From Wikipedia: C. V. Raman (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗see
key facts
- Born
- 7 November 1888
- Died
- 21 November 1970
- Known as
- physicist, university teacher
Facts: Wikidata (CC0)
Image: The Public Domain Review
