India, Aug. 8 -- In 1922 a young man, C Subrahmanya Ayyar, gave his first solo performance playing the violin at the Presidency College, Madras. The soiree was followed by a lecture by Ayyar's younger brother on the physical properties of the sound made by the violin. The latter was none other than the eminent physicist, Sir CV Raman. The connection between physics and the violin went much further. Ayyar himself would quote from the works of eminent physicists like Hermann von Helmholtz in his writings on the violin and Raman would go on to build a "mechanical violin player".

In the roughly two decades between World Wars I and II, Indian physicists published nearly a dozen papers in the two foremost international physics journals of the ...