In the past week or so, with the success of the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in finding the Higgs-Boson particle, we’ve all had the opportunity to become familiar with Professor Peter Higgs.
It prompted my friend Raj Marwah to post this note on FaceBook:
“Sure, Peter Higgs gave his name to the Higgs boson 'god’ particle, but in fact ALL bosons are actually named after an INDIAN physicist called Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for his early 1920s work in quantum mechanics, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. This entire class of particles (that obey Bose-Einstein statistics), ie bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac (surprisingly, an Englishman: he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge around that time).
Settle down, now. I'm just SAYIN …”
Satyendra Nath Bose was born in Bengal in 1898. He took his BSc and then MSc at the University of Calcutta, his marks in the latter being a record yet to be surpassed. In 1919 he was the first to translate Einstein’s papers on special and general relativity into English. His own work was seminal in creating the field of quantum statistics – he sent a paper on the subject to Einstein, who returned Bose’s favour by translating it into German. Having done his work mostly at the University of Calcutta, in 1926 he became head of the Department of Physics at Dhaka University, where he was to teach for three decades.
It was during a lecture at Dhaka that Bose made an error that subsequently became the basis of his new hypothesis, which in time supplanted Planck’s work and laid the foundations for modern quantum physics.
Good to know you. Thanks, Raj.
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