MEGHANATH SAHA

Saha’s most celebrated work was done in Calcutta. It led to his theory of high temperature ionization of atoms and its application to stellar atmospheres. His paper provided for the first time a straightforward interpretation of the different classes of stellar spectra in terms of the physical conditions, like temperature and pressure, prevailing in the stellar atmospheres. It thus acquired fundamental importance for all future work in astrophysics.



In 1919, the Premchand Raychand Scholarship took Saha to Europe for about two years. He spent five months in Imperial College, London, where he developed his theory further with the help of Professor A.Fowler. In November 1921 Saha returned to Calcutta as Khaira Professor of Physics, a new chair created from the endowment of Kumar Guruprasad Singh of Khaira. He left for Allahabad in 1923, to return in 1938 as Palit Professor of Physics. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1927 at the age of thirty-four.



Saha took keen interest in the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, and became its first full-time director in 1952. He also established what is now known as the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1948 and installed a 38-inch cyclotron or atom smasher, the first of its kind outside America and Europe.