S.N.

BOSE
PHYSICIST SATYENDRA NATH BOSE, BORN ON JANUARY 1, 1894, IN
CALCUTTA, INDIA, DISCOVERED WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS BOSONS AND
WENT ON TO WORK WITH ALBERT EINSTEIN TO DEFINE ONE OF TWO
BASIC CLASSES OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLES.
 PERSONAL DETAILS
• In 1914, age 20, Bose married Ushabala Ghosh, a wealthy physician’s daughter, who was 11 years old. The
marriage had been arranged by Bose’s mother. Bose would rather have married later, but went along with his
mother’s wishes. He refused to accept a dowry. The couple had nine children, seven of whom survived to be adults –
two sons and five daughters.
• Bose was a keen popularizer of science. In part, this was simply a love of science. Also however, he was a strong
supporter of Indian independence and he believed one of the best ways to secure a prosperous future for an
independent India was to have a well-educated, enlightened population.
• One way he popularized science was writing and speaking about it in Bengali to ensure it was delivered to a wider
audience. He ran evening classes for the children of workers.
• Bose never got a Ph.D degree. He could easily have been awarded one for his invention of quantum statistics, but he
was a very modest man; he was content to have made the discovery; he did not need the title ‘doctor.’
• After his paper was published, he spent two years in Europe working in France and Germany. He returned to Dhaka
where he became head of physics in 1927, age 33.
 RESEARCH AND TEACHING
•
CAREER
While studying at the University of Calcutta, Bose also served as a lecturer in the physics department. In
1919, he and Saha prepared the first English-language book based on German and French translations
of Albert Einstein's original special and general relativity papers. The pair continued to present papers on
theoretical physics and pure mathematics for several years following.
• In 1921, Bose joined the physics department at the University of Dhaka, which had then been recently
formed, and went on to establish new departments, laboratories and libraries in which he could teach
advanced courses. He wrote a paper in 1924 in which he derived Planck's quantum radiation law without
referencing classical physics—which he was able to do by counting states with identical properties. The
paper would later prove seminal in creating the field of quantum statistics. Bose sent the paper to Albert
Einstein in Germany, and the scientist recognized its importance, translated it into German and submitted
it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious scientific journal Zeitschrift für Physik. The publication led to
recognition, and Bose was granted a leave of absence to work in Europe for two years at X-ray and
crystallography laboratories, where he worked alongside Einstein and Marie Curie, among others.
BACHELOR’S AND MASTER’S
DEGREE
• By 1909, age 15, Satyendra Bose had completed high school. He began a bachelor
of science degree at Calcutta’s Presidency College, which is located next to the
Hindu School. He majored in Applied Mathematics, and again he proved to be an
outstanding student, graduating in 1913 at the top of his class, with first class honors.
• Bose decided he wanted to remain in academia. He enrolled for a master’s degree
in Applied Mathematics at the University of Calcutta. In 1915, age 21, he graduated
at the top of his class. He also learned enough scientific German and French to read
works published in these languages.
 RECOGNITION AND HONOUR
• Several Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson
and the Bose-Einstein Condensate. Bose was never awarded a Nobel Prize, despite his
work on particle statistics, which clarified the behavior of photons and "opened the door
to new ideas on statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory,"
according to physicist Jayant Narlikar, who said Bose's finding was one of the top 10
achievements of 20th-century Indian science.
• But Bose himself responded simply when asked how he felt about the Nobel Prize snub:
"I have got all the recognition I deserve."The Indian government honored Bose in 1954
with the title Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India. Five years
later, he was appointed as the National Professor, the highest honor in the country for a
scholar. Bose remained in that position for 15 years. Bose also became an adviser to the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, as well as president of the Indian Physical
Society and the National Institute of Science. He was elected general president of the
Indian Science Congress and president of the Indian Statistical Institute. In 1958, he
became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
 BOSE LETTER TO EINSTEIN
• 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. You
will see that I have tried to deduce the coefficient 8π ν2/c3 in Planck's
Law independent of classical electrodynamics, only assuming that the
ultimate elementary region in the phase-space has the content h3. 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.
 BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATE
• Einstein also did not at first realize how radical Bose's departure was, and in his first
paper after Bose, he was guided, like Bose, by the fact that the new method gave the
right answer. But after Einstein's second paper using Bose's method in which Einstein
predicted the Bose–Einstein condensate (pictured left), he started to realize just how
radical it was, and he compared it to wave/particle duality, saying that some particles
didn't behave exactly like particles. Bose had already submitted his article to the British
Journal Philosophical Magazine, which rejected it, before he sent it to Einstein. It is not
known why it was rejected.
• Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the
existence of phenomena which became known as Bose–Einstein condensate, a dense
collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which
was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.
 NOBEL PRIZE NOMINATION
• S.N. Bose was nominated by K. Banerji (1956), D.S. Kothari (1959),
S.N. Bagchi (1962) and A.K. Dutta (1962) for the Nobel Prize in
Physics, for his contribution to Bose–Einstein statistics and the unified
field theory. For instance, Kedareswar Banerjee, head of the Physics
Department, University of Allahabad, in a letter of 12 January 1956
wrote to the Nobel Committee as follows: “(1). He (Bose) made very
outstanding contributions to Physics by developing the statistics
known after his name as Bose statistics. In recent years this statistics
is found to be of profound importance in the classifications of
fundamental particles and has contributed immensely in the
development of nuclear physics. (2). During the period from 1953 to
date he has made a number of highly interesting contributions of far-
reaching consequences on the subject of Einstein’s Unitary Field
Theory.” Bose's work was evaluated by an expert of the Nobel
Committee, Oskar Klein, who did not see his work worthy of a Nobel
THE EFFECT OF BOSE’S
STATISTICS
• The statistics Bose introduced can seem like science fiction. In the quantum world, however, these statistics are real
enough. Imagine if Bose’s statistics applied to the world we see with the naked eye.
• Consider the situation when you simultaneously toss two distinguishable unbiased coins. You can write the following
outcomes, all of which have the same chance of happening.
• Possible Outcomes: (Two Heads) or (Two Tails) or (Head & Tail) or (Tail & Head)
• The chance of getting, say, two heads is 1⁄4.
• BUT, if you found it impossible to tell one coin from the other, then the coins become indistinguishable. Then you find:
• Possible Outcomes: (Two Heads) or (Two Tails) or (One of Each)
• The chance of getting, say, two heads is now 1⁄3.
• In the world of Bose statistics, the likelihood of events happening is different from our everyday expectations.