Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman Date of Birth : Nov 7, 1888 Date of Death : 1970 Place of Birth : Tamil Nadu

C.V.Raman was a scientist in Physics, who won noble prize in 1930. Raman was born on 7th November,1888 at Ayyanpettai in Tamil Nadu. He had his education in Visakhapatanam and Madras. After getting top ranking in the Financial Civil Service Competitive Exam, he was appointed as Deputy Accountant General in Calcutta (Kolkutta). In 1917 he became the professor of Physics at the Calcutta University. After 15 years service at the Calcutta University, Raman shifted to Bangalore and became the Director of the Indian Institute of Science in 1933. In 1943 he founded 'Raman Research Institute', near Bangalore. His discovery of the 'Raman Effect' made a very distinctive contribution to Physics. He was knighted by the British Government in 1929. He was also conferred the highest title of 'Bharat Ratna' in 1954. The 'Raman Effect' was a demonstration of the 'Collision' effect of light bullets (photons) passing through a transparent medium, whether solid, liquid or gaseous. Raman's publications include 'Molecular Diffraction of Light', 'Mechanical Theory of Bowed Strings' and 'Diffraction of X-ray's', 'Theories of Musical Instruments' etc. Raman conducted pioneering research in musical acoustics, particularly on Tamboura, the well known Indian musical instrument.

Dr. H. J. Bhabha Date of Birth : Oct 30, 1909 Date of Death : 1966 Place of Birth : Mumbai

The eminent scientist who ushered India into the atomic age was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha. He was born on 30 October 1909 in a Parsi family of Mumbai. He is called the 'Father of Indian Nuclear Science'. Dr.Bhabha was appointed the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1948. It was largely due to his efforts that the nation's first Atomic research Center, now named Bhabha Atomic research Center, was established at Trombay, near Mumbai. Under his expert guidance the nation's first atomic reactor 'Apsara' was also commissioned in 1956. In 1945, he founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Dr.Bhabha had a highly distinguished career and was an exceptionally bright student. Even as a student, he made some fundamental discoveries in electricity, magnetism, quantum theory and the cosmic rays. Dr.Bhabha as the scientist of a very high caliber, received many national and international awards and honours. In 1942, he was awarded the 'Adams' award. In 1951, Bhabha was elected the president of the Indian Science Congress. In 1955, he was elected the chairman of the U.N. sponsored International conference on the peaceful uses of the atomic energy held in Geneva. The Government of India also honoured him with 'Padma Bhushan' in 1954. The 'Homi Jehangir Bhabha Award' has been instituted by Indian National Science Academy. He passed away in 1966 in a plane crash.

Jagadish Chandra Bose Date of Birth : Nov 30, 1858 Date of Death : 1937 Place of Birth : Bengal

Jagdish Chandra Bose was an Indian physicist who pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics. Bose was born in Mymensingh in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) on November 30, 1858. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose worked as a tax collector for the British East India Company. His family originally hailed from the village Rarikhal, Bikrampur, in the current day Dhaka District of Bangladesh. Having started his studies in a local school, Bose studied at the St. Xavier's School and College at Kolkata. He passed the Entrance examination (equivalent to school graduation) of Calcutta University in 1875. He received a B.A. in Science from Calcutta University in 1879. Next, Bose went to England to study at Christ's College, Cambridge. He received a B.A. from Cambridge University and a B.Sc. from the London University in 1884. After completing his studies in London, Bose return to Kolkatta and was appointed Professor at Presidency College in Kolkatta. Then he became the director of the institute he founded and remained in the post till his death on 23rd November 1937. Jagadish Chandra Bose was one of the pioneers of modern science in India. His research was on the properties of electro-magnetic waves. His major achievement was to demonstrate the similarity of responses to stimulation among the living and the nonliving as well as the fundamental similarity of responses in plant and animal tissues. The British Government knighted him in 1917. He founded the 'Bose Research Institute' in Kolkatta in 1917. Bose was not only a biologist, but also a physicist. Bose believed that by focusing on the boundaries between different physical and biological sciences, he would be able to demonstrate the underlying unity of all things. Bose's biological researches were founded initially by the discovery that an electric receiver seems to show science of fatigue after continued use. He can rightly be called the inventor of wireless telegraphy. Bose was the first in the world to fabricate and demonstrate in public (1985) the device that generated microwaves-radio waves of very short wave length. But his invention was not patented before Guglielmo Marconi (1896) who became internationally recognised as the inventor

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Date of Birth : Oct 19, 1910 Date of Death : Aug 21, 1995 Place of Birth : Lahore

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel Laureate in Physics and one of the greatest astrophysicists of modern times was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, (now in Pakistan) to parents Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyaa civil servant and Sita Balakrishnan. Being the nephew of the great, C.V. Raman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics young Chandrashekhar's interest in the subject came naturally to him. In 1930, at the age of 19, he completed his degree in Physics from Presidency College, Madras and went to England for postgraduate studies at the Cambridge University. Chandrasekhar was noted for his work in the field of stellar evolution, and in the early 1930s he was the first to theorize that a collapsing massive star would become an object so dense that not even light could escape it; now known as the Black hole. He demonstrated that there is an upper limit ( known as 'Chandrasekhar Limit' ) to the mass of a White dwarf star. His theory challenged the common scientific notion of the 1930s that all stars, after burning up their fuel, became faint, planet-sized remnants known as white dwarfs. But today, the extremely dense neutron stars and black holes implied by Chandrasekhar's early work are a central part of the field of astrophysics. Initially his theory was rejected by peers and professional journals in England. The distinguished astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington publicly ridiculed his suggestion that stars could collapse into such objects( black holes). Disappointed, and reluctant to engage in public debate, Chandrasekhar moved to America and in 1937 joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and remained there till his death. At Chicago, he immersed himself in a personalized style of research and teaching, tackling first one field of astrophysics and then another in great depth. He wrote more than half a dozen definitive books describing the results of his investigations. More than 100,000 copies of his highly technical books have been sold. He also served as editor of the Astrophysical Journal, the field's leading journal, for nearly 20 years; presided over a thousand colloquia; and supervised Ph.D. research for more than 50 students. Chandrasekhar was a creative, prolific genius whose ability to combine mathematical precision with physical insight changed humanity's view of stellar physics.

In addition to his work on star degeneration, he has contributed significantly to many disparate branches of physics, including rotational figures of equilibrium, stellar interiors, radiative transfer of energy through the atmospheres of stars, hydro magnetic stability and many others. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983 and received 20 honorary degrees, was elected to 21 learned societies and received numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London; the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, London; the National Medal of Science, the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in his honor. He and his wife, Lalitha became American citizens in 1953. This genius passed away on 21 August 1995 in Chicago, Illinois, USA..

Dr.Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Date of Birth Date of Death Place of Birth : 1895 : 1955 : Punjab

Dr. Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar is known as 'The Father of Research Laboratories'. He is remembered for having established various chemical laboratories in the country. He was born in Bera, Punjab. After completing his M.Sc in India he went to England on a fellowship. On his return he served as a professor in Benaras Hindu University. He used to spent all his spare time in his laboratory doing research. He was awarded the title 'Sir' by the British in recognition of his service to Science, in 1941. As Nehru was much in favour of scientific development after Independence, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research was set up under the chairmanship of Dr. Bhatnagar. Later, he was awarded 'Padma Bhushan'. He became the first director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1940. After his death, CSIR established a Bhatnagar Memorial award for eminent scientists in his honour.

Vikram.A.Sarabhai Date of Birth Date of Death Place of Birth : 1919 : 1971 : Ahmedabad

Vikram.A.Sarabhai, was the main personality behind the launching of India's first satellite, Aryabhata in 1975. He was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in a family of industrialists. He was also responsible for the Equatorial Rocket Building Station at Thumba. Sarabhai set up the Ahmedabad Textile Industries Research Association, a laboratory for research in Physics and the Indian Institute of Management. Sarabhai was the second chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission and the Indian Space Research Organisation. Sarabhai's study of cosmic rays under the eminent scientist Dr. C.V. Raman, revealed that cosmic rays are a stream of energy particles reaching the earth from the outer space, being influenced on their way by the sun, the atmosphere and magnetism. This study helps in observing terrestrial magnetism and the atmosphere, the nature of the sun and outer space. He was conferred 'Padma Shri' in 1966 and was posthumously awarded 'Padma Vibushan' in 1972. He was also awarded 'Dr. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize' in 1962. This great scientist could be credited with launching India into space age.

Satyendra Nath Bose Date of Birth Date of Death Place of Birth : Jan 1, 1894 : Feb 4, 1974 : Kolkata

Satyendra Nath Bose (January 1, 1894 - February 4, 1974) was a Bengali Indian physicist, specializing in mathematical physics. Bose was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), the eldest of seven children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering Department of the East India Railway. He knew many languages and also could play Esraj (a musical instrument similar to violin) very well. Bose attended Hindu High School in Calcutta, and later attended Presidency College, also in Calcutta, earning the highest marks at each institution. From 1916 to 1921 he was a lecturer in the physics department of Calcutta University. In 1921, he joined the physics department of the then recently founded Dacca University (now called University of Dhaka), again as a lecturer. In 1926 he became a professor and was made head of the physics department, and continued teaching at Dacca University until 1945. At that time he returned to Calcutta, and taught at Calcutta University until 1956, when he retired and was made professor emeritus. Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the boson, Bose was not awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery or for his famous BoseEinstein statistics. While at the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a short article called 'Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta', describing the photoelectric effect and based on a lecture he had given on the ultraviolet catastrophe. During this lecture, in which he had intended to show his students that theory predicted results not in accordance with experimental results, Bose made an embarrassing statistical error which gave a prediction that agreed with observations, a contradiction. Since the coins are distinct, there are two outcomes which produce a head and a tail. The probability of two heads is one-fourth. The error was a simple mistake that would appear obviously wrong to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics, and similar to arguing that flipping two fair coins will produce two heads one-third of the time. However, it produced correct results, and Bose realized it might not be a mistake at all. He for the first time held that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. Thus he stressed in the probability of finding particles in the phase space each having

volumes h^f and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles. Physics journals refused to publish Bose's paper. Discouraged, he wrote to Albert Einstein, who immediately agreed with him. Bose had earlier translated Einstein's theory of General Relativity from German to English. It is said that Bose had taken Albert Einstein as his Guru (the mentor). Because photons are indistinguishable from each other, one cannot treat any two photons having equal energy as being different from each other. By analogy, if the coins in the above example behaved like photons and other bosons, the probability of producing two heads would indeed be one-third. Bose's "error" is now called Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. From this, the duo predicted the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was proven to exist by experiment in 1995. Bose's ideas were afterward well received in the world of physics, and he was granted leave from the University of Dacca to travel to Europe in 1924. He spent a year in Paris and worked with Marie Curie, and met several other well-known scientists. He then spent another year abroad, working with Einstein in Berlin. Upon his return to Dhaka, he was made a professor in 1926. He did not have a doctorate, and so ordinarily he would not be qualified for the post, but Einstein recommended him. His work ranged from X-ray crystallography to grand unified theories. He together with Meghnad Saha published an equation of state for real gases. Apart from physics he did some research in biochemistry and literature (Bengali, English). He made deep studies in chemistry, geology, zoology, anthropology, engineering and other sciences. Being of Bengali origin he devoted a lot of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language, translating scientific papers into it, and promoting the development of the region. In 1944 Bose was elected General President of the Indian Science Congress. In 1958 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society