journal of science education

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Editorial

Biman Nath, Associate Editor

We have as our feature scientist for this month, K S Krishnan, who was one of the stalwarts of Indian scientists in the twentieth century. He was not only the co-discoverer of the Raman effect – as the media have often portrayed him, with insinuations of conspiracy theories. As the readers of this issue will discover, the legacy of Krishnan is much more enriching than such titillating stories.

Krishnan’s scientific endeavours can be viewed as attempts to open various ‘peep-holes into the interiors of molecules’ (as Jagjit Singh once wrote). His collaboration with Raman on the scattering of light by molecules provided one such peep-hole. Later, when he moved to Dacca, his innovative techniques to probe the correlations between the magnetic properties of crystals and their internal structure gave another way of investigating the microworld. Yet another peep-hole was his research on the energy distribution of electrons in graphite crystals. It is not only the world of molecules, Krishnan’s deep mathematical insight also took him along many other paths – our readers would remember an article in an earlier issue of Resonance on Krishnan’s work on the sampling theorem (February 2002).

The biographical sketch and his radio talk also bring out other
facets of Krishnan’s mind. One of his strong beliefs was that science was best explained in one’s mother tongue, and he himself wrote and lectured on science in Tamil. In India, we seem to have almost given up in our attempt to use the vernacular in communicating scientific thoughts. Perhaps Krishnan’s thoughts would provoke introspection in some of us.

We also have in this issue a number of interesting articles, on the basics of embedded systems, on the depressingly shrinking ozone layer, on the mechanism behind flowering of plants, among others.

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