Snippets of Information
Personalities - Science
* 4 Feb 2025
In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose, a physicist from Kolkata, faced a
disappointing setback. His paper on quantum statistics that introduced a
novel way to describe particles of light (photons) had been rejected by
a prominent journal. His paper treating particles as indistinguishable,
challenging classical physics. It was a brand new concept, perhaps too
bold for the time, and The Philosophical Magazine rejected it.
But Bose decided to get bolder: he sent his work directly to Albert
Einstein. Einstein immediately recognised its importance. He not only
translated it into German but also submitted it to the prestigious
Zeitschrift für Physik on Bose's behalf. This single act gave birth to
Bose-Einstein statistics, a fundamental principle in quantum mechanics.
Eventually, Bose's insights led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein
condensate, a new state of matter observed at extremely low
temperatures.
If Einstein hadn't stepped in, Bose's research might have been buried in
obscurity. But thanks to their collaboration, his work laid the
foundation for understanding an entire class of particles: bosons, which
are named after him.
Bosons are particles that mediate forces in the universe. The Higgs
boson, in particular, plays a key role in the Higgs field, which gives
particles mass. Without Bose-Einstein statistics, scientists would not
have been able to predict or understand how bosons behave. Satyendra
Nath Bose's work laid the foundation for these discoveries, even though
he never worked directly on the Higgs mechanism.
His teachers included renowned mathematician Jagadish Chandra Bose and physicist Prafulla Chandra Ray.
Source: India Today Education Desk by Roshni Chakrabarty, 4 Feb 2025 indiatoday.in/education-today
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