A scientist who made Bangalees proud

Satyendra Nath Bose was an eminent mathematician and physicist specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, collaborating with Albert Einstein in developing the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensate and as the namesake of the ‘Boson’ or ‘God Particle’.

S.N. Bose was born in Kolkata on January 1, 1894. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant in the Railway Department and his mother, Amodini Raichaudhury, was the daughter of Motilal Chaudhury of Alipur. He passed the entrance examination in 1909 in fifth place from Kolkata Hindu College.

He stood first in the F.A. examination in 1911 at Kolkata Presidency College. From the same college, he graduated in 1913 and an M.A. in 1915 in mathematics and secured first class in both examinations. Between his two degrees, Bose married Ushabati at age 20. In the same year, he joined as a lecturer at Science College and worked with Dr. Meghnad Saha in the fields of pure Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

In 1919, Bose became a research scholar at the University of Kolkata and began his studies on the theory of relativity. While studying at the University of Kolkata, Bose also served as a lecturer in the Physics Department. During this time, Bose and Saha translated the original German papers of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity into English. The pair continued to present papers on theoretical physics and pure mathematics for several years following.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Dhaka University began its journey and he came to Dhaka and joined the Physics Department as a Reader; and went on to establish new departments, laboratories and libraries in which he could teach advanced courses there. He used to teach quantum mechanics in the class.

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 Einstein in Germany, and the scientist recognised its importance, translated it into German, attached a paper of his own on the same topic and submitted it on Bose’s behalf to the prestigious scientific journal Zeitschrift fur Physik. The publication led to the creation of Bose-Einstein statistics, for which Bose was granted a leave of absence to work in Europe for two years at X-ray crystallography laboratories, where he worked alongside Einstein and Marie-Curie, among others.

Einstein adopted the idea of Bose-Einstein statistics and extended it to atoms, which led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena that became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons-particles with integer spin that was named for Bose. Bose-Einstein condensate follows the rules of Bose-Einstein statistics.

Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter which is typically formed when a gas of bosons at low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (0o Kelvin or-273.150o Celsius). It is referred to as the fifth state of matter. A state of matter is one of the distinct forms in which matter can exist. Four states of matter are observable in everyday life: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Bose-Einstein condensate for gaseous rubidium atoms was first made by the scientist 25 years ago. It was short-lived and unstable.

To make a more stable Bose-Einstein condensate, scientists started working in the International Space Station (ISS) Lab outside the Earth’s gravity. ISS is usually selected to experiment because of its little or zero gravity situation there. And very recently, scientists successfully made the stable and long-lasting Bose-Einstein condensate in the ISS Lab. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, matter stops behaving as independent particles and collapses into a single quantum state that can be described with a single, uniform wave function.

Two examples of materials containing Bose-Einstein condensates are superconductors and superfluids. Superconductors conduct electricity with virtually zero electrical resistance: Once a current is started, it flows indefinitely. The liquid in superfluids also flows forever. There is no friction.

Bose-Einstein condensate may offer scientists some key clues into the workings of quantum mechanics, potentially helping to solve mysteries such as how to create a ‘theory of everything’ that could explain the workings of the cosmos from the smallest to the largest scale.

A boson is a particle that follows Bose-Einstein statistics. Boson makes up one of the two classes of elementary particles, the other being fermion. The name boson was given by Paul Dirac to commemorate the contribution of Satyendra Nath Bose to quantum statistics. Examples of bosons are fundamental particles such as photons and the recently discovered Higgs boson. Higgs boson is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, who, in 1964, along with five other scientists, proposed the Higgs mechanism to explain why particles have mass. This mechanism implies the existence of the Higgs boson or God particle (The name God Particle was given by the news media). In 2012, Higgs boson was detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), situated in Geneva, Switzerland (CERN is meant for the European Council for Nuclear Research), God particle, which was once predicted by S.N. Bose at Dhaka University, was detected at CERN. The discovery of the Higgs boson won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert in physics. The detection of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider may offer scientists some key clues into the workings of the early universe.

After his stay in Europe, Bose returned to the University of Dhaka in 1926. However, upon his return, Bose did not publish for a significant time. According to a July 2012 New York Times article in which Bose is described as the ‘Father of the God particle,’ the scientist’s interest wandered into other fields, including philosophy, literature and the Indian independence movement. He published another physics paper in 1937 and in the early 1950s, worked on unified field theory.

After 25 years in Dhaka, Bose moved back to Kolkata in 1945 and continued to research and teach there until he died in 1974. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958. Several Nobel Prizes were awarded for research-related concepts of the Bose-Einstein statistics, Bose-Einstein condensate and boson. Bose was never awarded a Nobel Prize, despite his work on quantum statistics, which clarified the behaviour of photons and opened the door to new ideas on the statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum mechanics; according to physicist Jayant Narlikar, who said Bose’s finding was one of the top ten 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.’ 

To promote science in the Bangla language, he founded Bonggyo Biggyan Parishad and published a monthly journal named Gayen Biggyan from it. He was awarded Deshikottom by Bishawbharathi University and ‘Padma Vibhushan’ by the Government of India. In 1974 Dhaka University founded ‘Bose Chair’ for physics research.

About 12 years after Bose’s death, the Indian parliament established the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Salt Lake, Kolkata. Regardless of the honours and recognition his own country bestowed upon Bose, the international community failed, for the most part, to regard him as a scientist who made a major discovery. When in the summer of 2012, people celebrated the international cooperation that led to a breakthrough in detecting the existence of the Higgs boson, credited to British physicist Peter Higgs and the Higgs boson.

On July 10, 2020, The Economic Times in their editorial said, ‘Many people in this country [India] have been perplexed, and even annoyed, that the Indian half of the now-acknowledged ‘God particle’ is being carried in lower case.’ The editorial went on to say that what people do not realise is that the naming of all ‘bosons’ after Bose ‘actually denotes greater importance.’

The writer is a former scientist with the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dhaka. He could be reached at [email protected].