Two things happened recently – Google unveiled the first version of its quantum chip in December 2024 and 2 days ago we had the jayanti of Satyendranath Bose – one of the scientists whose work led to the origins of Quantum physics.
January 1, 2025 was the 131st jayanti of Satyendranath Bose, known for the Bose-Einstein Condensate Theory and for discovering a class of particles, which became known after him – called Bosons and for work which led to the origin of Quantum physics.
He is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientists ever, and the Boson particle, which he discovered, has been often-times colloquially referred to as the God particle.
Then again, to call S.N.Bose simply a scientist, would be akin to calling Michelangelo a mere painter or Sachin Tendulkar just a cricketer. Bose was genius polymath, equally adept in music, literature & mineralogy, and Physics, of-course…
Born on January 1, 1894 in a middle class Kolkata family, his father Surendranath Bose was an accountant in the East India Railway Company. SN Bose was the only son in a family that had six daughters after him.
While in school, seeing his skills at mathematics, his father started working with him, giving him more & more complex problems to solve, above & beyond his age. In order to better challenged academically. He joined Kolkata’s prestigious Presidency College, and majored in Applied Mathematics. While in college, he also learnt German and French, primarily to enable himself to read published scientific works in those languages.
Bose’s entry into the world of Academia was also the time when quantum theory & relativity was emerging as a new field of study. Between 1916 & 1919, he was teaching applied mathematics & theoretical physics. By 1919, he, alongwith Meghnad Saha, had also published an English translation of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
In 1921, he was appointed at the University of Dhaka as Physics Reader, where he made his most famous discovery. His derivation of Planck’s radiation law. Using Max Planck’s law, he tried to provide a solution to classical physicists to account for the range of electromagnetic radiation frequencies emitted by a hot body. Basically Planck’s theory stated that if energy is quantified as coming in fixed multiples of what is called as Planck’s constant, the theory of radiation could be explained.
It was THAT theory gave rise to what we know today as Quantum Physics.
Einstein & Bose
So, Einstein in 1905 had taken Planck’s theory, applied the classical Boltzmann statistics to it, allowing him to describe the photon. Brilliant as his work was, many leading physicists of the time, rejected it, saying that light could only travel in waves and not particles. Wave-particle duality of light was still unheard of then.
It was around 1920 that Bose was preparing to teach Planck’s theory and something did not seem right to him. So he replaced Boltzmann’s statistics with his own and wrote a paper titled ‘Planck’s Law and Hypothesis of Light Quanta’.
He sent this paper to Philosophical Magazine. However his thesis was rejected, which was ironic as it would actually prove to be one of the most ground breaking theories ever.
Bose also sent the same to Einstein with the cover note “I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. I am anxious to know what you think of it. You will see that I have tried to deduce the coefficient 8πν2/c3 in Planck’s Law independent of the classical electrodynamics.“
Einstein immediately knew that he was looking at one of the most significant breakthroughs in science. Planck’s quantum law used one of the classical physics factors, 8πν2/c3. Bose had managed to produce the same factor, without using any classical physics theory, but instead it came from his own hypothesis that photons with equal energy were not distinguishable from each other. Einstein translated Bose’s work into German, got it published in the journal – Zeitschrift für Physik. He called it a very important step, actually it was a ground breaking theory, that laid one of the foundations for Quantum Physics.
The more Einstein dwelt over Bose theory, the more he was intrigued by it. He considered the possibility of applying Bose Quantum Statistics to a gas made of atoms to see the effects. And this led to one of the major breakthroughs, the Bose-Einstein Condensate, where each particle in a collection of particles exists in the same identical quantum state.
A brief primer on the Bose-Einstein Condensate
At room temperature, the atoms in gas behave like particles. As temperature rises, the atoms gain wave nature, and move closer to each other. As temperature rises more and more, inching to absolute zero, waves merge to form a single super wave. Within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero, the Bose Einstein Condensate forms & all individual atoms have merged.
Based on this, In December 1946, Paul Dirac coined the word bosons, in honour of Bose for discovering the existence of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics.
Bose & his other pursuits
Bose was interested in making science popular too and also strongly supported Indian independence. He believed that a well educated, enlightened population was what could move India on the path to progress. He also promoted Bengali as a medium of instruction, translated many scientific papers into it. As Head of Department for Physics at University of Dhaka in 1926, he, along with Meghnad Saha, made it a hub for scientific research, setting up an X-Ray crystallography lab himself.
Apart from science, he also had a keen interest in English, Bengali literature, and even did research on it.
After Partition, S.N.Bose returned to Kolkata where he taught till 1956, and then later also became VC of Shantiniketan. He insisted, that every student should use local materials and technicians to design their own equipment. He later returned to Kolkata where he did research in nuclear physics, and also on organic chemistry. He also worked on applied research, he did great work in extracting helium from the hot springs at Bakreshwar. In 1959, S.N.Bose was appointed as National Professor, the highest honour for a scholar, and was in the position for 15 years. He also worked as an advisor to the newly formed CSIR, and was General President of Indian Science Congress.
A true polymath he did research in fields as varied as literature, biotechnology, zoology & anthropology. Bose was also highly adept at playing the Esraj (a musical instrument).
Inspite of his pioneering research on discovering Bosons & Quantum Statistics, Bose never got a Nobel Prize. The irony was that many ‘western’ scientists who did research on Bosons & Bose-Einstein statistics were given the Nobel, but not Bose himself.”
So, on his jayanti today do take time to pay tribute to Satyendranath Bose, one of the world’s greatest scientists and yet another great son of Bharat…