S N Bose

Remembering one of India's most famous scientists on his birth anniversary:

Satyendra Nath Bose (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian mathematician  and physicist specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. 

The class of particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac.

A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics,  chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in sovereign India.

Early Life:

Bose was born in Calcutta in a Bengali family. He was the only son, with six sisters after him. His ancestral home was in the village Bara Jagulia, in the then district of Nadia, in the Bengal Presidency. He passed his matriculation exam in 1909. He next joined the intermediate science course at the Presidency College, Calcutta, where his teachers included Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sarada Prasanna Das, and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Bose chose mixed (applied) mathematics for his BSc and passed the examinations standing first in 1913. He  stood first in the MSc mixed mathematics exam in 1915 as well. His marks in the MSc examination created a new record in the annals of the University of Calcutta, which is yet to be surpassed. 

After completing his MSc, Bose joined the Science college, Calcutta University as a research scholar in 1916 and started his studies in the theory of relativity. It was an exciting era in the history of scientific progress. Quantum theory had just appeared on the horizon and important results had started pouring in. 

As a polyglot, Bose was well versed in several languages such as Bengali, English, French, German and Sanskrit as well as the poetry of Lord Tennyson, Rabindranath Tagore and Kalidasa. He could play the esraj, an Indian musical instrument similar to a violin. He was actively involved in running night schools that came to be known as the Working Men's Institutes.

Research Career:

Bose attended Hindu School and later Presidency College, both  in Calcutta, earning the highest marks at each institution, while fellow student and future astrophysicist Meghnad Saha came second. He came in contact with teachers such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Naman Sharma who provided inspiration to aim high in life. From 1916 to 1921, he was a lecturer in the physics department of the Rajabazar Science College under the  University of Calcutta. 

Along with Saha, Bose prepared the first book in English based on German and French translations of original papers on Einstein's special and general relativity in 1919. In 1921, he joined as Reader of the department of Physics of the recently founded University of Dhaka (in present-day Bangladesh). Bose set up whole new departments, including laboratories, to teach advanced courses for MSc and BSc honours and taught thermodynamics as well as James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

Satyendra Nath Bose, along with Saha, presented several papers in theoretical physics and pure mathematics from 1918 onwards. In 1924, while working as a Reader at the Physics Department of the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics. This paper was seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics.Though not accepted at once for publication, he sent the article directly to Albert Einstein in Germany. Einstein, recognising the importance of the paper, translated it into German himself and submitted it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. As a result of this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and crystallography laboratories, during which time he worked with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Einstein himself.

Bose-Einstein statistics:

While presenting a lecture  at the University of Dhaka on the theory of radiation,  Bose  showed his students that the contemporary theory was inadequate, because it predicted results not in accordance with experimental results.

In the process of describing this discrepancy, Bose for the first time took the position that the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles, where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. 

Bose adapted this lecture into a short article called "Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta" and sent it to Albert Einstein with the following letter. (I have left out the heavy scientific details  from the letter):

"Respected Sir, 

I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. I am anxious to know what you think of it.  I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper worth publication I shall be grateful if you arrange for its publication in Zeitschrift für Physik. Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request. Because we are all your pupils though profiting only by your teachings through your writings. I do not know whether you still remember that somebody from Calcutta asked your permission to translate your papers on Relativity in English. You acceded to the request. The book has since been published. I was the one who translated your paper on Generalised Relativity."

Einstein agreed with him, translated Bose's paper "Planck's Law and Hypothesis of Light Quanta" into German, and had it published in Zeitschrift für Physik under Bose's name, in 1924.

Bose's interpretation is now called Bose–Einstein statistics. This result derived by Bose laid the foundation of quantum statistics, and especially the revolutionary new philosophical conception of the indistinguishability of particles, as acknowledged by Einstein and Dirac. 

Bose-Einstein condensate:

Einstein  did not at first realize how radical Bose's paper  was. But after the prediction of the Bose–Einstein condensate, Einstein  started to realize just how important it was, and he compared it to wave/particle duality -  some particles don't behave exactly like particles, but like waves. 

The Bose–Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles  named after Bose),  was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.

Bose's work stood at the transition between the 'old quantum theory' of Planck, Bohr and Einstein and the new quantum mechanics of Schrodinger, 

Heisenberg, Born, Dirac and others.

Dhaka:

After his stay in Europe, Bose returned to Dhaka in 1926. He did not have a doctorate, and so ordinarily, he would not be qualified for the post of Professor he applied for, but Einstein recommended him. He was then made Head of the Department of Physics at Dhaka University. He continued guiding and teaching at Dhaka University.

Bose designed equipment himself for an X-ray crystallography laboratory. He set up laboratories and libraries to make the department a center of research in X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, magnetic properties of matter, optical spectroscopy, wireless, and unified field theories. He also published an equation of state for real gases with Meghnad Saha. He was also the Dean of the Faculty of Science at Dhaka University until 1945.

Calcutta:

When the partition of India became imminent (1947), he returned to Calcutta and taught there until 1956. He insisted every student design his own equipment using local materials and local technicians. He was made professor emeritus on his retirement. He then became Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. He returned to the University of Calcutta to continue research in nuclear physics and complete earlier works in organic chemistry. 

Other fields:

Apart from physics, he did some research in biotechnology and literature (Bengali and English). He made deep studies in chemistry, geology, zoology, anthropology, engineering and other sciences. Being Bengali, he devoted a lot of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language, translating scientific papers into it, and promoting its  development.

Honours:

In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his only book on science, Visva–Parichay, to Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose was honoured with title Padma Vibhushan by the Indian Government in 1954. In 1959, he was appointed as the National Professor, the highest honour in the country for a scholar, a position he held for 15 years. In 1986, the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences was established by an act of Parliament, Government of India, in Salt Lake, Calcutta.

Bose became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958. He was nominated as member of Rajya Sabha.

Nobel Prize nomination:

S.N. Bose was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics  three  times -  1956, 1959 and 1962, for his contribution to Bose–Einstein statistics and the unified field theory.  However, Bose's work was evaluated by an expert of the Nobel Committee, Oskar Klein, who did not see it as being  worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Legacy:

Bosons, a class of elementary subatomic particles in particle physics were named after Satyendra Nath Bose to commemorate his contributions to science.

Although seven Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to S N Bose's concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and the  Bose–Einstein condensate, Bose himself was not awarded a Nobel Prize.

In his book 'The Scientific Edge', physicist Jayant Narlikar observed:

'SN Bose's work on particle statistics,  which clarified the behaviour of photons  and opened the door to new ideas on statistics of microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class.'

When Bose himself was once asked that question, he simply replied, "I have got all the recognition I deserve"— probably because in the realms of science to which he belonged, what is important is not a Nobel, but whether one's name will live on in scientific discussions in the decades to come.

Death:

Bose died in Calcutta  on February 4, 1974, aged 80, of bronchial pneumonia.