Joseph Jhon Thomson

Sir Joseph John Thomson, OM, FRS (18 December 1856 - 30 August 1940) often known as J. J. Thomson, was an English physicist, the discoverer of the electron.
Joseph John Thomson was born in 1856 near Manchester in England, of Scottish parentage. He studied engineering at Owens College, Manchester, and moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1884 he became Cavendish Professor of Physics. In 1890 he married Rose Paget, and he had two children with her. One of his students was Ernest Rutherford, who would later succeed him in the post.
Influenced by the work of James Clerk Maxwell as well as the discovery of the X-ray, he deduced that cathode rays (produced by Crookes tube) exhibited a single charge-to-mass ratio e/m and must be composed of a single type of negatively charged particle. He called these particles "corpuscles". The term electron had been proposed earlier, by G. Johnstone Stoney, as a fixed quantum of electric charge in electrochemistry, but Thomson realized that it was also a subatomic particle, the first one to be discovered. His discovery was made known in 1897, and caused a sensation in scientific circles, eventually resulting in him being awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics (1906). His son George Paget Thomson later received the prize for proving that the electron also had properties of a wave (See wave-particle duality). Much of this work was done at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Thomson's investigations into the action of electrostatic and magnetic fields on the nature of so called "anode rays" or "cathode rays" with an instrument he called a parabola spectrograph [1]) are considered as the invention of the mass spectrometer, a tool which was later improved by Francis Aston and allows the determination of the mass-to-charge ratio of ions and which has since become an ubiquitous research tool in Chemistry. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, he made another ground-breaking discovery: the isotope. In addition, Thomson proposed the Plum pudding model of the atom in 1904, though it was disproven in 1909.
He was knighted in 1908 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1912. In 1914 he gave the Romanes Lecture in Oxford on "The atomic theory". In 1918 he became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained until his death. He died in 1940 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Sir Isaac Newton.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha

Son of a barrister, Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born in Bombay on October 30, 1909. He grew up in a totally aristocratic and rich environment. After passing the Senior Cambridge Examination at the age of sixteen, he joined the Gonvile and Caius College in Cambridge with an intention to pursue mechanical engineering. After obtaining his honors degree in 1930, he began to do research at the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in 1935 and remained in Cambridge until 1939. When the war broke out in Europe, Bhabha who was on his holiday in India decided to stay back.
In 1940, C.V. Raman requested him to join the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A theoretical physicist by training, Bhabha realized the relationship between theory and experiments, and started experiments in the area of Cosmic rays. He was elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and in 1943, he was elected the President of the Physics section of the Indian Science Congress. Bhabha approached JRD Tata for an institute, which would be fully devoted to fundamental research. JRD a visionary in his own rights was impressed and this laid a foundation and soon establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay in 1945, with Bhabha as the Director, a position he held till his last day. Bhabha gained international stature in the scientific community. He served as the President of the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, first held in Geneva in 1955, and from 1960-1963 as President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He died in a plane crash on Mount Blanc in 1966.

Hargobind khorana

Khorana was born into a poor family in Raipur in Punjab. He attended Punjab University at Lahore and the University of Liverpool, England, on government scholarships.
He obtained his Ph.D. at Liverpool in 1948. He began research on nucleic acids during a fellowship at the University of Cambridge under Sir Alexander Todd. He held fellowships and professorships in Switzerland at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the universities of British Columbia, Can. and Wisconsin; in 1971 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Khorana continued research on nucleic acid synthesis and in 1970 prepared the first artificial copy of a yeast gene. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that helped to show how the genetic components of the cell nucleus control the synthesis of proteins.

C.V.Raman

C.V. Raman born at Trichinnapalli in Southern India. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics. He entered Presidency College, Madras, in 1902, and in 1907 he gained his M.A. degree, obtaining the highest distinctions. His earliest researches in optics and acoustics - the two fields of investigation to which he has dedicated his entire career - were carried out while he was a student. Since at that time a scientific career did not appear to present the best possibilities. Raman joined the Indian Finance Department in 1907; though the duties of his office took most of his time, Raman found opportunities for carrying on experimental research in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Calcutta.
He is the man who placed India on World Map by discovering the Raman Effect. The Raman Effect is being used as an extremely refine tool to study the solid, liquid and gasses in modern laboratories across the world. In 1917 he was offered the newly endowed Palit Chair of Physics at Calcutta University. After 15 years at Calcutta he became Professor at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore and since 1948 he is Director of the Raman Institute of Research at Bangalore, established and endowed by him. In 1922 he published his work on the "Molecular Diffraction of Light", the first of a series of investigations with his collaborators which ultimately led to his discovery, of the radiation effect which bears his name. He was given a Noble Prize in Physics. His birthday is celebrated as a National Science day all over India. The fillip that Raman gave to India's recovery and upsurge of science is immeasurable.

chandrashekarsubhramanyam (1910-1995)

Born in Lahore, nephew of Sir Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman (CV Raman), who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. Chandrasekhar was educated at Presidency College, at the University of Madras, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1933 to 1937 he held a position at Trinity. Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics to Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Astrophysics and became an U.S. citizen in 1953.
Chandrasekhar determined what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit - that a star having a mass more than 1.44 times that of the Sun does not form a white dwarf but instead continues to collapse, blows off its gaseous envelope in a supernova explosion, and becomes a neutron star. An even more massive star continues to collapse and becomes a black hole. These calculations contributed to the eventual understanding of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes. Chandrasekhar was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1953 and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1962. He was given a Noble Prize in 1983.