On board a ship on an ocean voyage

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

It's fascinating that three of the most important developments in Indian science happened not in a laboratory or lecture hall, but in the most unlikely of places, on board a ship on an ocean voyage.

The first was in 1893, on a voyage from Yokohama to Vancouver,  when Swami Vivekananda met Jamsetji Tata & inspired him to create an institute that merged the humanism of the east with the science and Technology of the west.  That's how the Indian Institute of Science started.

In 1930,  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won a scholarship to study at Cambridge & while aboard the ship to England did the bulk of the work on the Chandrashekhar Limit for stars,  for which he would later be awarded a Nobel Prize. This was, amazingly, before his 20th birthday.

And in 1921, 9 years earlier,  CV Raman, returning home   from Oxford on a sea voyage was dazzled by the deep blue of the Mediterranean  and decided to study the scattering of Light. The 'Raman Effect' won him a Nobel Prize in 1930.

Raman was so confident of getting the Nobel Prize after missing out in 1928 and 1929 that he booked his ocean voyage tickets to Sweden months before he knew he had won.

137th birth anniversary of CV Raman today.

Perhaps this may help iisc.ac.in/wp-content/upl…

https://x.com/joybhattacharj/status/1986652319501722055?t=2b9j77ronFm09ql5EXjHyA&s=19