Biography of Satyendra Nath Bose, A Famous Bengali Physicist
Biography of Satyendra Nath Bose, A Famous Bengali Physicist
Satyendra Nath Bose (commonly known as S.N. Bose or Satyen Bose) was an Indian physicist and mathematician. He is one of the most praised physicists after the famous Albert Einstein. In fact, he is the best Bengali scientist until now. He is well known for his great research on quantum mechanics.
Early Life and Education
Satyendra Nath Bose was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India (now West Bengal, India) on 1 January 1894. He belongs to a prominent Bengali Family. His father Surendra Nath Bose was an engineer in the East Indian Railway Company.
At the age of 5, Bose started schooling near his home. Then he was admitted to the New India School at Goabagan where he continued schooling until he was admitted to the Hindu School. From this school, he passed his entrance examination in the year 1909 and obtained 5th position.
Bose was interested in Science from his childhood. So he did his intermediate course in Science. He passed the intermediate examination from the Presidency College in 1911. He received a BSc in Mixed Mathematics from the Presidency College and ranked first. Then he completed the MSc in Mixed Mathematics in 1915 from the same college.
For his brilliant result in both BSc and MSc, a wide window had opened in front of him to start research works on science projects. So he joined the Science College under Calcutta University as a research scholar in 1916 and started researching the theory of relativity.
Bose was lucky to have Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sarada Prasanna Das and Prafulla Chandra Ray as his teacher during his student life.
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Research Works
Bose's teachers Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Naman Sharma inspired him to aim high in life. Famous astrophysicist Meghnad Saha was a classmate of Bose. Along with Saha, Bose prepared the first book in English based on German and French translation of original papers on Einstein's special and general theory of relativity in 1919. Apart from this, Bose and Saha presented several papers in Theoretical Physics and Pure Mathematics later on.
In 1924, Bose wrote a paper deriving Plank's Quantum Radiation Law without any reference to Classical Physics by using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. He sent the article directly to Albert Einstein as he was refused by the publishers to publish it. Einstein felt the importance and significance of this paper and he himself translated it into German. This success brought him the opportunity to work with the great Albert Einstein.
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Bose was the first man who said that the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution would not be true for microscopic particles, where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will be significant. Thus he stressed the probability of finding particles in the phase space, each state having volume three power to h and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles. Bose adapted this idea into a short article titled "Planck's Law and The Hypothesis of Light Quanta" and sent it to Einstein. Surprisingly, Einstein agreed with Bose. That's our Bose!
Bose's interpretation produced accurate results since photons are indistinguishable from each other, one cannot treat any two photons having equal energy as being two distinct identifiable photons. This interpretation is now called Bose-Einstein Statistics.
"Bose-Einstein Condensate" is another success of Bose. It's 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. Under such conditions, a large fraction of Bosons occupies the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum mechanical phenomena, particularly wave function interference, became apparent macroscopically.
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This state was first predicted first by Albert Einstein and a pioneering paper by Bose.
While working at the University of Dhaka, he designed an X-ray crystallography laboratory. He also set up laboratories and libraries to continue his works on X-Ray spectroscopy, X-Ray diffraction, magnetic properties of matter, optical spectroscopy, wireless and unified field theories.
In 1947, Bose returned to Calcutta from Dhaka. He continued his researches on Nuclear Physics and Organic Chemistry at Calcutta University.
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Carrer
Bose was completely devoted throughout his life to the betterment of mankind using science and technology. He spent most of his career in British India. He stayed abroad for study and research purposes for a very short span of time. Other than that, he performed most of the projects in Dhaka And Calcutta University. He also holds some important academic positions in various institutions like:
- Lectures in the Physics Department of the Rajabazar Science under Calcutta University from 1916 to 1921
- Reader, Professor and Head of the department of physics of Dhaka University
- Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Dhaka.
- Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University
- Professor Emeritus
- National Professor for 15 years during 1959-1974
- Adviser to the newly formed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
- President of Indian Physical Society.
- President of the National Institute of Science
- General President of the Indian Science Congress
- Vice President and President of the Indian Statistical Institute
- Fellow of the Royal Society.
- Member of Parliament Rajya Sabha, during 1952-1960
Bose was not very much eager to leave India, his beloved motherland. His student life, research career and working places almost are in this country. He proved that to be a successful scientist, it's not necessary to go abroad.
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Honours and Recognitions
Nothing can evaluate or recognize the significance of this great Indian Bengali Scientist. Einstein's companionship itself was a great honour and recognition for Bose.
Bose was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times in 1956, 1959 and 1962. But he was not awarded this prestigious prize. Although, seven Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to Bose's concepts. But Bose was not worried about that.
Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his only book on science, Visva-Parichay to Bose.
Bose was honoured with Padma Vibhushan by the Indian Government in 1954.
S.N.Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Kolkata is named after him.
Death
S.N Bose died on February 4, 1974, at the age of 80.
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Satyendra Nath Bose was not only a born scientist, but he was also a great human being. He was proficient in many languages like English, French, German, Sanskrit and of course Bengali as it is his mother tongue. The poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Kalidasa Attracted him a lot. He was a great appreciative of Indian music. He could play the Esraj, an Indian musical instrument.
He was also a great social worker throughout his life. Being Bengali, he devoted a lot of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language.
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