The colours of light – The Hindu

Ravana and Meghnath are standing inside Lanka’s observatory, which is filled with giant crystalline lenses and massive metal tuning forks. Ravan taps a tuning fork, which hums with a deep vibrating resonance. Meghnath watches, fascinated.

Ravana: These are not simple weapons. To master the Suryastra, you must understand the particles of light called photons. To master the Rudrastra, you must understand the science of sound or acoustics.

Meghnath: What are these concepts? How did you learn them?

Ravana (Smiles): Not from books, Meghnath. I learnt them from Lord Shiva in the state of Yoganidra.

Meghnath: You mean you learnt Physics while sleeping?

Ravana: Not while sleeping but in the Hypnagogic State, which is between being awake and dreaming. In the future, scientists will call it Lucid Dreaming. It is where the conscious mind rests, but the subconscious one begins to work.

Ravana walks to the balcony and looks down at the crashing waves of the ocean.

Ravana: Do you know that, in the future, a scientist named C.V. Raman will look at this very ocean and ask, “Why is the sea blue?”

Meghnath: That is easy. It reflects the blue sky.

Ravana (laughs): That is what everyone thought. But Raman proved them wrong. He discovered that water molecules scatter sunlight and, because blue light scatters the most, the sea looks blue. This discovery was called the “Raman Effect” and it changed Physics forever. Later, India will declare the day of his discovery — February 28 — as National Science Day.

Meghnath: Incredible. But Raman was a scientist in a lab. You claim that you got knowledge from dreams. Can serious science happen when you are half-asleep?

Ravana: Do not underestimate the sleeping mind! The greatest discoveries often come when the brain is unchained from reality. In the future, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan will claim that the Goddess Namagiri wrote complex mathematical formulas on his tongue while he dreamt. The scientist Dmitri Mendeleev, exhausted trying to organise the chemical elements, will fall asleep at his desk and, in a dream, see a table where every element fell into place.

Meghnath: He dreamt the Periodic Table?

Ravana: Niels Bohr will struggle to understand the atom and dream of a sun with planets spinning around it. From that, he will draw the structure of the atom. Much later than these men will come Larry Page.

Meghnath: Who is that”

Ravana: One of the creators of what will be called Google. At the age of 23, he dreamt about downloading the entire Internet. After he woke up, he did the Maths and created a search engine that organised the world’s knowledge.

Meghnath: So, is napping actually studying?

Ravana chuckles and picks up a steel ball and sit in a chair holding the ball loosely over a metal plate on the floor.

Ravana: If done correctly. This is what Albert Einstein will do later in time. He understood that the best ideas come just as you drift off. If you fall into deep sleep, you will forget them.

Ravana closes his eyes and breathes deeply. His fingers relax, and the ball slips from his hand, falls, and hits the metal plate with a deafening noise. Meghnath jumps. Ravana’s eyes snap open, alert.

Ravana: The noise will jerk him back to reality and he will remember the brilliant ideas from his half-asleep state and write them down before they fade.

Meghnath (rubs his ears): That is … effective.

Ravana: That is the power of the mind. Now, let us leave dreams and conduct an experiment with light to honour Sir C.V. Raman.

Sunset in a glass

Materials needed: A clear glass of water; flashlight (phone torch can also be used); few drops of milk or soap solution

Step 1: Turn off the lights. Shine the light through clear water. The light beam is almost invisible because the water molecules are too small to scatter the light waves effectively.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Step 2: Now, add a few drops of milk or soap solution and stir it. When you shine the flashlight again and look from the side, the water appears blue because the introduced particles scatter the shorter, bluer wavelengths of light sideways towards your eyes, much like how the atmosphere scatters sunlight to make the sky look blue
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Step 3: Shine the light again and look at the beam straight from the opposite side of the glass. The light appears orange or red. Since most of the blue light has been scattered away sideways, only the longer red and orange wavelengths are left to travel straight through the water to your eyes. This is also the reason for sunsets appearing to be red!

The author is the founder and CEO of Vaayusastra Aerospace, an IIT-Madras IC graduated ed-tech company, and a Ph.D. research scholar in Education at NITTTR.

Published – February 26, 2026 09:01 am IST