5th October 2016
Kolkata is often called the city of ‘bhadralok’, or ‘noble people’ – a city that has been home to educational elites for more than a century. Remarkably, it is also the city that has bred five Nobel laureates.
2nd May 2016
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist. In 1895 he was working with cathode rays when he discovered a different kind of electromagnetic radiation. Since the radiation was unknown at that time, he called it the X-rays. He received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 for this discovery.
8th April 2016
Jagadish Chandra Bose as a professor of Physics at Presidency College, Kolkata, was offered a salary substantially lower than his European colleagues, many of whom were less qualified than him. Prof. Bose was then under the Imperial Education Service (IES). He refused to accept it but nevertheless left no stone unturned in discharging his duties. After three long years, the IES relented and placed him at par with the European professors. This incident played a significant role in instilling in him an everlasting sense of nationalistic fervour and zeal.
16th February 2016
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German physicist who discovered quantum physics. He was the founder of quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck’s life was dotted with tragic occurrences. His first wife died early. His younger son died in World War I. He had twin daughters, one of which died during childbirth. The other twin married the husband of the first twin sister. They married and after two years she also died during childbirth. In 1944, when Planck was eighty-five, during World War II, a bomb fell on his house destroying all his documents and a lifetime of accumulations. The next year, his only surviving son was executed after being caught in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
16th February 2016
The year 2012 celebrated the 125 years of five innovators, Henry Moseley, Sukumar Ray, Erwin Schrödinger, Jamini Roy, and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist who provided the explanation of X-ray spectra, which justified many concepts in chemistry by sorting the chemical elements of the Periodic Table of the Elements in a quite logical order based on their physics. He died at the age of 26 only at the First World War. Sukumar Ray was an Indian writer who was known for his humorous creations. He wrote poems, stories, and playrights exclusively for children. His innovative creations are sometimes called ‘literary nonsense’, but these were full of sense. He also died young at the age of 33, but before that he fathered Satyajit Ray, who later become a world famous film director. Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933. Jamini Roy was an Indian painter who experimented with tribal folk art and transformed them into innovative paintings with his new style of painting. Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was an Indian mathematician and self-taught genius who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions.
10th February 2016
In 1920, Meghnad Saha discovered his ionization formula (Saha Ionization Equation). In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose found his photon derivation of Planck’s Law (Bose Statistics). In 1928, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman discovered the Raman Effect. In 1930, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar predicted the Chandrasekhar Limit. Together they contributed to the golden era of Indian physics.