Science & Technology Quiz: Indian Scientists and Their Contributions

The correct answer is B, 1930. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the effect named after him, which he had demonstrated on 28 February 1928; he was the first Asian and the first person from a non-white country to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences. Option A, 1913, is the year Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Nobel of any kind to come to India, and candidates who remember only that an Indian won early in the century choose it. Option C, 1968, belongs to Har Gobind Khorana, who shared the prize in Physiology or Medicine for interpreting the genetic code. Option D, 1983, belongs to S. Chandrasekhar, Raman nephew, who shared the Physics prize for his work on the structure and evolution of stars. Keeping the four years 1930, 1968, 1983 and 2009 in order solves most questions in this chapter.

The correct answer is A, the Raman effect. C. V. Raman announced on 28 February 1928 that when a beam of light passes through a transparent medium a small fraction of it is scattered with a shifted wavelength, which carries information about the molecules of the medium; the Government of India fixed National Science Day on that anniversary in 1986. Option B is wrong; the Chandrasekhar limit, the greatest mass a white dwarf can hold, is a calculation of the early nineteen thirties and no national day is attached to it. Option C is wrong; Meghnad Saha ionisation equation, which explains the spectra of stars from their temperature and pressure, has no day of its own, important though the work is. Option D is wrong; the statistics worked out by Satyendra Nath Bose and extended by Einstein gave the boson its name but is likewise not marked by a day. The other days to remember are 22 December and 15 September.

The correct answer is B, Vikram Sarabhai. He founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad in 1947, convinced the government to set up the Indian National Committee for Space Research in 1962, picked Thumba near the magnetic equator for the first sounding rocket launch in November 1963, and led the organisation that became the Indian Space Research Organisation in 1969; the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram is named after him. Option A is wrong; Homi Bhabha is the father of the Indian nuclear programme, and swapping the two men is the commonest error in this chapter, though Bhabha did support the early space work. Option C is wrong; A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is the Missile Man, who directed the Satellite Launch Vehicle and the guided missile programme. Option D is wrong; Satish Dhawan headed ISRO from 1972 and the launch centre at Sriharikota is named after him, but he did not found the programme.

The correct answer is B, S. Chandrasekhar. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed, while still in his twenties, that a white dwarf heavier than about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun cannot be held up by the pressure of its degenerate electrons and must collapse further; the figure is called the Chandrasekhar limit, it underlies the modern account of neutron stars and black holes, and it brought him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is named for him. Option A is wrong; Meghnad Saha gave the ionisation equation that lets astronomers read the temperature of a star from its spectrum, a different and earlier contribution. Option C is wrong; Satyendra Nath Bose gave the quantum statistics after which bosons are named. Option D is wrong; Jagadish Chandra Bose worked on plant physiology and radio waves and had nothing to do with stellar structure, but the shared surname makes him a standard distractor.

The correct answer is B, the interpretation of the genetic code. Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Robert Holley and Marshall Nirenberg for showing how the sequence of nucleotides in nucleic acids specifies the amino acids of a protein; he later synthesised the first artificial gene, a landmark in molecular biology. He was born at Raipur in undivided Punjab and later became a citizen of the United States. Option A is wrong; alkaloid chemistry is associated with Asima Chatterjee, who worked on anti-epileptic and anti-malarial compounds. Option C is wrong; the structure and function of the ribosome brought Venkatraman Ramakrishnan a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, four decades later. Option D is wrong; plant physiology is the field of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who built the crescograph to measure growth and showed that plants respond to stimuli.

The correct answer is A, Jagadish Chandra Bose. He designed the crescograph, which magnifies the growth of a plant many thousand times so that it can be recorded, and used it and related instruments to argue that plants respond to light, heat, touch and other stimuli much as animals do. He also did pioneering work on very short radio waves before Marconi transatlantic experiments, and he founded the Bose Institute at Kolkata in 1917. Option B is wrong; Prafulla Chandra Ray, the father of Indian chemistry, discovered mercurous nitrite in 1896 and founded Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works. Option C is wrong; Birbal Sahni was a palaeobotanist who studied the fossil plants of India, and the institute at Lucknow carries his name. Option D is wrong; Salim Ali, the birdman of India, conducted the systematic bird surveys of the subcontinent and wrote The Book of Indian Birds.

The correct answer is C, Dr. Lalji Singh. He developed the probe that made DNA fingerprinting practicable in India at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, where the first Indian case used the technique in 1988; he later founded the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics and served as Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. Option A is wrong; no scientist of that name is associated with the technique, and the option is included only to fill the paper. Option B is wrong; M. S. Swaminathan is the father of the Green Revolution in India, who introduced the high-yielding wheat varieties of the nineteen sixties and won the first World Food Prize in 1987. Option D is wrong; C. N. R. Rao is a chemist known for his work on solid state and materials chemistry and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2014. The technique itself was devised in Britain by Alec Jeffreys in 1984.

The correct answer is A, M. Visvesvaraya. Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born on 15 September 1861, served as Diwan of Mysore, designed the automatic sluice gates used at the Krishna Raja Sagara dam and the block system of irrigation, planned flood protection for Hyderabad, and received the Bharat Ratna in 1955; the day is observed as Engineer Day in his memory. Option B is wrong; A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was born on 15 October, and that date is observed as World Students Day and in India as a reading day, so the two anniversaries are only a month apart and are deliberately offered together. Option C is wrong; Homi Bhabha was born on 30 October and no national day is attached to him. Option D is wrong; Satish Dhawan, who headed ISRO through the nineteen seventies and eighties, was born in September but has no day named for him; the Sriharikota range carries his name instead.

The correct answer is B, Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was born on 22 December 1887 at Erode, worked largely without formal training, and left results on infinite series, continued fractions, partitions and the mock theta functions that mathematicians are still developing; he worked with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The number 1729 is called the Ramanujan number, the smallest that can be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Option A is wrong; Aryabhata, of the fifth century, gave the value of pi and the rotation of the earth and lends his name to India first satellite, but no day marks his birth. Option C is wrong; Brahmagupta, of the seventh century, set out the rules of arithmetic with zero and negative numbers. Option D is wrong; D. R. Kaprekar is remembered for the Kaprekar constant 6174 and other recreational results.

The correct answer is A, astrophysics. Meghnad Saha showed in 1920 how the degree to which a gas is ionised depends on its temperature and pressure, and the equation let astronomers read the temperature of a star directly from the lines in its spectrum and so classify stars in a physically meaningful way; it is counted among the foundations of modern astrophysics. Saha also planned the river projects of eastern India and the institute at Kolkata that bears his name. Option B is wrong; the laws of radioactive decay belong to Rutherford and Soddy and have nothing to do with thermal ionisation. Option C is wrong; semiconductor physics rests on band theory and the work of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, though ionisation of impurities matters there in a different sense. Option D is wrong; plant physiology is the field of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who is often placed in these options to catch the unwary.

The correct answer is B, M. S. Swaminathan. He led the introduction of the high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties into Indian fields in the nineteen sixties, worked with the government on the package of seed, fertiliser and irrigation that turned the country from food imports to self-sufficiency, and received the first World Food Prize in 1987. Option A is wrong; Verghese Kurien is the father of the White Revolution, who built the cooperative dairy model at Anand and led Operation Flood, which made India the largest milk producer. Option C is wrong as the answer to this stem; Norman Borlaug of the United States bred the dwarf wheats and is called the father of the Green Revolution in the world, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, but the question asks for India. Option D is wrong; Birbal Sahni was a palaeobotanist who studied fossil plants, with no part in agricultural policy.

The correct answer is B, Homi J. Bhabha. He persuaded the Tata trusts to fund the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Bombay in 1945, became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission set up in 1948, and founded the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay, which was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after he died in an air crash over the Alps in January 1966; his scientific work was on cosmic ray showers and on the scattering that carries his name. Option A is wrong; Vikram Sarabhai founded the Physical Research Laboratory and led the space programme, and he did succeed Bhabha at the Atomic Energy Commission, which makes this option tempting, but he was not its first chairman. Option C is wrong; Raja Ramanna led the team that conducted the nuclear test of 1974 and later directed BARC. Option D is wrong; Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar built the chain of national laboratories as the first Director-General of the CSIR.