The Interaction of Matter and Radiation: The Physics of C.V. Raman, S.N. Bose and M.N. Saha. Part 2: Physics Highlights

Three extraordinary physics discoveries were made from colonial India, which did not have any previous tradition of research in modern physics: Saha ionization equation (1920), Bose statistics (1924), Raman effect (1928). All the three discoverers were founding faculty members of the new small physics department of Calcutta University, which started functioning from 1916. These discoveries were all in the general topic of interaction between matter and radiation. In Part 1, we have described the social and the intellectual environment in which these discoveries were made. Now, in Part 2, we shall first give a background of the revolutionary developments taking place in physics at that time. Then we shall provide a non-technical account of the three discoveries and point out the kind of impact these discoveries made in the subsequent development of physics.