Historical Event on 11/7/1888

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Indian physicist, was born in Tiruchirapalli, South India. His work was influential in the growth of science in India. He was the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics for the 1928 discovery now called 'Raman scattering'--a change in frequency observed when light is scattered in a transparent material. When monochromatic or laser light is passed through a transparent gas, liquid, or solid and is observed with the spectroscope, the normal spectral line has associated with it lines of longer and of shorter wavelength called the Raman spectrum. Thus the Raman effect is applied in spectrographic chemical analysis and in the determination of molecular structure.