S. Ramaseshan, the Teacher*
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S. RAMASESHAN: AN APPRECIATION type which works in the laboratory may was the first Chairman of the Techno- noisseur of literary style; to all these shin- not work too well during pilot production, logy Transfer Committee of the Chitra ing qualities, the gods gave him a keen which is followed by the R&D group and Institute and played a major role in sense of humour to the regalement of his industry blaming each other to their bridging the gap between the Chitra friends. It is curious that we hardly ever mutual detriment. In the eighties, long laboratory and industry. He did not hesi- touched upon questions relating to faith or before incubators became fashionable, the tate to don the hat of the Chairman of religion even though our free-wheeling Chitra Institute set up a facility known as a joint sector company which manufac- discussions covered everything from ‘Techno-prove’ where the R&D group tured the blood bag developed by the archeometallurgy to zeolites! Neverthe- and engineers deputed by the industry Chitra Institute – he was as committed as less I am persuaded that his credo would worked together on the basis of an MOU the rest of us to the scientific and com- be of a piece with the summum bonum of under GMP conditions to produce a few mercial success of Chitra technologies. human existence – truth, happiness and thousands of a given device over a 2–3 As I recall my long and precious asso- beauty (Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram). year period. The Techno-prove ensured ciation with Ramaseshan, memories and It is a privilege to salute Ramaseshan the success of the transfer of technology images crowd in my mind. He is a quint- on his 80th birthday. of the blood bag, oxygenator and the essential scientist but much more; a tech- Chitra–TTK valve and continues to be in nologist with a sharp eye on practicality; M. S. VALIATHAN active use for the service of the Institute a colleague who cheers and inspires his and industry. The Techno-prove was a team; a speaker who moves his audience Manipal Academy of Higher Education, brainchild of Ramaseshan and its con- and even holds them spellbound when Manipal 576 104, India struction was supported by industry. He speaking on Raman or Ramanujan; a con- e-mail: [email protected] S. Ramaseshan, the teacher* Prof. Ramaseshan started his career in tific and industrial research. We did go on for days. A meeting with him physics as a student of C. V. Raman. academic research in an environment would often go beyond the problem on Like most of Raman’s students he also charged with applied research. hand. Being an excellent teacher he could was infected with optics, a subject that We briefly sketch here the personal enthuse the student in related topics as he loves even to this day. In retrospect recollections of our association with well. Thus we learnt lot more than what we can say that his association with Ramaseshan during his stay at the National was necessary for a mere paper or a Raman had a lasting impact on his tastes Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), Bangalore. problem. He would repeatedly stress that in science in general and physics in par- Those days it was called the National physics was like cheese and that one ticular. Anything in optics interests him Aeronautical Laboratory. He had moved could enter it anywhere and get out of and everything else in physics he tries to in a few years earlier to build and deve- it anywhere else. This is probably why translate into the language of optics. What lop its Materials Science Division. Here, is more, he has managed to pass on this he was involved in both pure and applied infection to a few of his students. And research. In scientific (pure) research he we are amongst that fortunate few. It is was occupied with problems in crystal probably not an understatement if we say physics, high pressure physics, piezo- that his entry into the domain of crystal- optics, neutron-optics, disordered struc- lography was again through optics, in tures and scattering processes in metallic particular through optical diffraction. But and magnetic systems. Of course he had it was only a sojourn in crystallography not completely given up formal crystal- and not a migration to it. When we joined lography. In industrial (applied) research as Research Fellows he was already a his interests were in stress analysis of renowned crystallographer. But when air-frame structures, corrosion in metals crystallography became an industry to and alloys, electrochemical machining, determine crystal structures he chose to composites and opto-electronic materials. phase out of it. It was during his withdra- We were surprised at his wide spectrum wal phase from this area that we were of research interests and even wondered with him as his students. Only we knew how he kept track of all these activities. that he was undergoing a ‘phase’ trans- This was all the more an enigma since he formation. This period also coincides always met daily each one of us and with his move from an academic institu- spent enough time on the research prob- tion to a laboratory dedicated to scien- lems that we were working on. When the problems that we were occupied with *Dedicated to Prof. S. Ramaseshan on his reached an exciting stage he would always 80th birthday. meet us many times a day and this would S. Ramaseshan (circa 1960s). 1082 CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 85, NO. 7, 10 OCTOBER 2003 S. RAMASESHAN: AN APPRECIATION we find many of his students being inte- rested in and have often contributed to a variety of topics. He strongly advo- cated a first order change in the research topic after one’s thesis work. He des- pised narrow specialization and abhorred professionalism in research. It will be unfair if we do not at least briefly comment upon some the specific areas of research that we were involved in when we were his students. Some of the topics of research were: Effect of mecha- nical stress on natural and magnetic rota- tion in single and polycrystals; optical diffraction in chiral, periodic and random media; anomalous scattering of X-rays and neutrons in disordered systems; stress- induced dichroism in absorbing systems; neutron optical rotation in heli-magnetic Ramaseshan lecturing in the early 1980s. structures, electrical resistivity of metals, alloys and liquid metals; high pressure studies in metals, alloys and spin systems. invited the high pressure physicist A. stress measurement by X-rays, by polar- In many of these topics, optics played a Jayaraman of AT&T Laboratories (Bell ized light, with mechanical methods, and role, one way or the other. To do optics Laboratories at that time) to set-up a high in composites. A young research scholar and not to know the Poincaré sphere was pressure facility at NAL. Jayaraman’s work took for granted the prevailing congenial alien to him. In addition, he repeatedly on caesium became an inspiration for the atmosphere for research, only to realize emphasized the usefulness of Jones’ matri- ‘two-species’ model developed for under- decades later how much thought, effort ces in optical calculations. As his asso- standing the effect of pressure on the and leadership had gone into creating ciates we also got infected by both the electronic behaviour of liquid caesium. such an atmosphere. The first few years Poincaré sphere and Jones’ matrices. All the main features of the resistivity of research are surely as formative and Thus we often ended up playing with the behaviour could be explained on this important as those of childhood, and we Poincaré sphere and employed Jones’ model within the framework of Krishnan– remember vividly some of the highlights. matrix method in our calculations. In a Bhatia–Ziman theory of liquid alloys. This The scientific atmosphere that prevailed similar vein, we picked up Fourier optics model also led to some interesting results during Ramaseshan’s stay at NAL was too. Another area to which he turned his in the pressure dependence of the ther- truly outstanding. We were always encou- attention was lattice dynamics and struc- moelectric power of liquid caesium. raged to interact with other groups and ture of non-crystalline materials. With In today’s environment, it seems impro- with visitors, some of whom were very K. S. Viswanathan (of the Mathematical bable that Ramaseshan could have built distinguished. We have fond memories Science Division of NAL, who as a student a group of research students working on of interacting and discussing our research of C. V. Raman had become an expert basic physics at the Materials Science problems with such distinguished physi- in lattice dynamics) he established the Division at NAL. He often attracted cists as Ashcroft, Bardeen, Bloembergen, breakdown of Friedel’s Law in inelastic young students through talks. One of us deGennes, Fisher, Goodenough, A. Jayara- neutron scattering. Later on, one of us (RN) was lured by his two lectures on man, Kapitza, G. N. Ramachandran and (TGR) collaborated with him on this pro- ‘Waves’ at the Theosophical Society and Ziman, to name a few. At least three of blem and showed that the initial phase one on the ‘Fourth State of Matter’ at the them got the Nobel prize – after their of the elliptic motion corresponding to a Vivekananda College, Madras. In fact, the visits to NAL which were a part of their complex polarization vector can be got second author (TGR) took to research and visits to Bangalore. Again, we took it again from anomalous scattering.