Satyendra Nath Bose

Satyendra Nathan Bose (Bengali: সত্যেন্দ্রনাথ বসু Satyendranāth Basu) (January 1, 1894 – February 4, 1977) was an Indian physicist specializing in mathematical physics. He is known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, which laid the foundation for Bose-Einstein Statistics and the Bose-Einstein Condensate theory. The boson (one of the elementary particles) is recognized with that name in his honor. He was awarded the second highest civil award in India, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 given by the Indian government.

Bose was born in Calcutta, the eldest of seven children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering Department of the East India Railways.

Bose attended the Hindu High School in Calcutta and then the College of the Presidency, also in Calcutta, always earning top marks. From 1916 to 1921 he was a professor in the physics department of the University of Calcutta. In 1921 he joined the physics department of the new Dhaka University (now called Dhaka University), again as a student.

Teaching

In 1919 he returned to Calcutta and taught at the University of Calcutta until 1956, when he retired from teaching and was made professor emeritus.

His greatest scientific achievement came when he sent a manuscript to Einstein for him to review and translate. Einstein was amazed by the work and recommended it for publication. The "paper" was the seed of what later became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate.

Research

Bose attended the Calcutta Hindu School and later Presidency College, also in Calcutta, where he earned top marks, while fellow astrophysicist and future astrophysicist Meghnad Saha came second. He came into contact with professors such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Naman Sharma who inspired him to aim high in life. From 1916 to 1921 he was a professor in the physics department of the Rajabazar Science College of the University of Calcutta. Together with Saha, Bose prepared in 1919 the first book in English based on German and French translations of Einstein's original papers on special and general relativity. In 1921, he joined the Physics Department of the newly founded University of Dhaka (in present-day Bangladesh) as a lecturer. Bose created entirely new departments, complete with laboratories, to teach advanced bachelor's and master's courses, and taught thermodynamics and the James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

Satyendra Nath Bose, together with Saha, presented several papers on theoretical physics and pure mathematics starting in 1918. In 1924, while working as a Lecturer (non-professor) in the Department of Physics at the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a paper in which he derived Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics, using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. This paper was instrumental in creating the important field of quantum statistics.Although it was not immediately accepted for publication, he sent the paper directly to Albert Einstein in Germany. Einstein, recognizing the importance of the article, translated it himself into German and submitted it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. Thanks to this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and crystallography laboratories, where he collaborated with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie and Einstein.

Bose-Einstein Condensate

Data on the distribution of the speed of a gas of rubid atoms, which confirm the discovery of a new phase of matter, the condensed of Bose-Einstein. Left: just before the appearance of a Bose-Einstein condensed. Center: right after the appearance of the condensed. Right: after a new evaporation, leaving a sample of almost pure condensate.

Einstein also did not at first realize how radical Bose's departure was, and in his first paper after this he was guided, like Bose, by the fact that the new method gave the correct answer. But after his second paper using the Bose method, in which Einstein predicted the Bose-Einstein condensate (left image), he began to realize how radical it was, and compared it to wave-particle duality, saying that some particles did not behave exactly like particles. Bose had already submitted his article to the British Philosophical Magazine, which rejected it before he sent it to Einstein. It is not known why he was rejected.

Einstein took the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of a phenomenon known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (particles with integer spin, after Bose) whose existence was demonstrated experimentally in 1995.