1000 Words Essay on Satyendra Nath Bose in English
Born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, Satyendra Bose is the eldest of seven children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked for the Engineering Department of the East India Railway. Bose attended both the Hindu School and Presidency College in Calcutta, where he received the highest grades. Inspiring him to strive for greatness in life were professors such as Jagadish Chandra Bose (no relation) and Prafulla Chandra Roy. From 1916 to 1921, he taught in the physics department of the University of Calcutta. In 1921, he returned as a lecturer to the department of Physics at the newly established Dacca University (now the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh). Surender Nath remained alert and energetic despite living to the ripe old age of 96.
Satyendra was consistently the top student in his class and a brilliant student from the beginning. His enthusiasm and curiosity for science were evident from a young age. Even during his academic years, his exceptional intelligence was evident.
Teachers recognised immediately that Satyendra will become a prominent scientist and mathematician in the future. He enjoyed improvising equipment for his classroom experiments and even constructed his own telescope. He attended Presidency College in Calcutta.
There, he met many outstanding students, including Meghnad Saha, J.N. Mukherjee, Nikhilranjan Bose, and J.C. Ghosh. Some of them would eventually become distinguished scientists. He was also fortunate to have had J.C. Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, and S.N. Maitra as instructors. He was also introduced to Subhash Chandra Bose during this time. He received his bachelor’s degree at the age of 19 and his master’s in 1915.
Satyendra Bose and Usha Devi were married on May 5, 1914. Calcutta University offered only graduate-level courses in modern physics and mathematics in 1916. In the same year, he was hired as a physics lecturer at the university.
Before joining Dacca University, Satyendra held this position for his alma mater from 1916 to 1921. His brief but brilliant paper on “Max Plank’s Law” and “Light Quantum Hypothesis” brought him widespread recognition at that time. He emailed this article to Albert Einstein, who enjoyed it so much that he translated it into German and submitted it to a prestigious German publication for publication.
Bose toured Europe in 1924, visiting Paris, Berlin, etc. Before travelling to the city, he worked at the Madame Curie Laboratory before meeting Albert Einstein. In addition, he met numerous renowned European scientists and engaged in lengthy discussions on a wide range of scientific topics. He was named professor of physics at Dacca University in 1926. There were accolades for his 25 years of service.
1944 saw his election as president of the 31st session of the Science Congress. He was named Kharia Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta in 1945. Following his retirement from Calcutta University, he was given the title of Emeritus Professor. He was subsequently named vice chancellor of Vishvabharti University. In 1958, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was awarded honorary Doctor of Science degrees by numerous universities.
Comparing his findings to the mathematical techniques of ancient Rome and China, Satyendra concluded that Indian techniques were more advanced and older. He was awarded the Nelson Wright Medal by the Numismatic Society of India in 1945.
In the early 1920s, Satyendra Nath Bose made contributions to quantum mechanics that laid the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the Bose-Einstein condensate theory. He is commemorated as the namesake of the boson. Although multiple Nobel Prizes were awarded for studies related to the boson, Bose-Einstein statistics, and Bose-Einstein condensate, including the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for advancing the theory of Bose-Einstein condensates, Bose was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In addition to his other abilities, Bose could play the Esraj, a musical instrument similar to the violin. In his book The Scientific Edge, the renowned physicist Jayant Narlikar wrote: “S.N.Bose’s work on particle statistics (circa 1922), which clarified the behaviour of photons (the particles of light in an enclosure) and opened the door to new ideas on the statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th-century Indian science and was worthy of the Nobel Prize.”
Without reference to classical physics, Bose published a paper in 1924 that derived Planck’s quantum radiation law. After initial publishing failures, he sent the manuscript directly to Albert Einstein in Germany.
Einstein, recognising the importance of the paper, translated it into German and submitted it on Bose’s behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. This honour allowed Bose to leave India for the first time and spend two years collaborating with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein in Europe. Bose returned to Dacca in 1926. Until 1945, he served as a professor and chairman of the Department of Physics at Dhaka University. He taught at Calcutta University until 1956, when he retired and was designated professor emeritus. Bose’s Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta, written at the University of Dhaka, describes the photoelectric effect and is based on a lecture he gave on the ultraviolet catastrophe. During this lecture, Bose intended to demonstrate to his students that theory predicted results that were inconsistent with experimental results. However, he made an embarrassing statistical error that resulted in a prediction that was consistent with observations, thereby demonstrating a contradiction. The error was a simple one that anyone with a basic understanding of statistics would recognise as incorrect, similar to claiming that one-third of the time two fair coins will yield two heads. However, accurate results were obtained, and Bose acknowledged that it may not have been an error after all. He asserted for the first time that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution would not hold true for microscopic particles, where Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty will cause significant fluctuations. Thus, he emphasised the possibility of discovering particles with individual volumes of h3 in phase space, disregarding their position and momentum. The physics journals declined to publish Bose’s article. Bose’s findings were disregarded because, according to their argument, he had presented them with a simple error. Discouraged, he wrote to Albert Einstein, who immediately agreed with him. Physicists stopped laughing when Einstein submitted his own paper to the 1924 edition of Zeitschrift für Physik to accompany Bose’s.
Bose had previously translated Einstein’s theory of General Relativity from German to English. According to reports, Bose viewed Albert Einstein as his mentor (mentor). Because photons cannot be distinguished from one another, two photons with equal energy cannot be considered distinct. If the coins in the previous example behaved like photons and other bosons, the probability of getting two heads would be one-third (tail-head = head-tail). Bose’s “error” is now known as Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein embraced the concept and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (particles with integer spin, named after Bose) whose existence was experimentally confirmed in 1995. Subsequently, Bose’s theories were highly regarded in the field of physics, and in 1924 he was granted leave from the University of Dhaka to travel to Europe. He spent one year in France, where he collaborated with Marie Curie and met a number of distinguished scientists. He then spent another year abroad working with Albert Einstein in Berlin. After his return to Dhaka in 1926, he was appointed a professor. Einstein recommended him for the position despite his lack of a degree. His research ranged from X-ray crystallography to unified field theories. He also presented an equation of state for actual gases with Meghnad Saha. Besides physics, he conducted research in biochemistry and literature (Bengali, English). He conducted extensive research in the disciplines of chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, engineering, and others. Being of Bengali descent, he devoted a considerable amount of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language, translating scientific works into it, and fostering regional development. 1944 saw the election of Bose as president of the Indian Science Congress. In 1958, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. The renowned scientist Niels Bohr once delivered a speech. Bose was in charge of the proceedings. At one point, the instructor struggled to explain a particular topic. He was writing on the blackboard when he stopped and asked Professor Bose, “Can you help me?” Satyendranath had been seated the entire time with his eyes closed. Professor Bohr’s comments caused the audience to smile. To their great surprise, however, Bose opened his eyes and immediately solved the lecturer’s problem. Then he sat down and again closed his eyes!
