विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)
He was born in watrap, near Srivi. Distant relative to an atthai of mine iirc. Will ask father about him - RL
श्रीवैष्णवः।
Source: TW
People often think the Raman Effect was a Eureka moment in a single afternoon. In reality, it was a grueling endurance test. Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan (1898-1961) was the person who sat in the darkroom of the IACS (Kolkata) for months.
He painstakingly purified & tested 65 different dust-free liquids to see if they all showed the same feeble fluorescence (the early name for the Raman Effect). Krishnan kept a detailed research diary. Entries from early 1928 show that he was the one who 1st clearly observed that the new radiation was polarized, a key technical proof that it was not just ordinary fluorescence. Raman himself later wrote that if the Nobel had been awarded only for the work of 1928, Krishnan would have justly shared the prize.
Later in his career, Krishnan moved to Crystal Magnetism. He wanted to measure the magnetic anisotropy (how a crystal’s magnetic properties change based on its orientation) of tiny organic crystals. In the 1930s, there was no sophisticated equipment for this. He developed the Critical Torque Method. Using simple materials, famously described by colleagues as sealing wax & string, he suspended crystals from fine quartz fibers & measured their rotation in a magnetic field.
This method was so precise that it allowed him to calculate the orientation of molecules inside a crystal before X-ray crystallography became common. It remains a foundational technique in magnetochemistry today.
Yrs before Claude Shannon (the father of Information Theory) published his famous Sampling Theorem in 1948, K.S. Krishnan had already derived a similar mathematical concept in the context of physics. In elite scientific circles, Krishnan is regarded as 1 of the few Complete Physicists, someone who was equally brilliant at complex mathematical theory & dirty-hands experimental work.
When the NPL was being built in Delhi, the architects planned to cut down several old trees to make way for the massive building. Krishnan refused. He personally intervened to redraw the architectural plans so that the trees could be saved. He believed that symmetry is achieved by harmonious addition, not by destruction. To this day, the NPL campus is 1 of the greenest scientific spots in Delhi because of his stubborn love for nature.
In 1958, when India established the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (the Indian Nobel), K.S. Krishnan was the very 1st recipient. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1940, yet he remained so modest that he preferred people just call him KSK.