Published: 04th February 2020
The Bose in Bose-Einstein: 10 reasons why SN Bose is still making India proud, 46 years after his death
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A Fellow of the Royal Society, Satyendra Nath Bose was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India. He is seen with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru here
A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, and music
As a polyglot, Bose was well versed in several languages such as Bengali, English, French, German and Sanskrit. He could play the esraj as well
Bose attended Hindu School in Calcutta, and later attended Presidency College, also in Calcutta, earning the highest marks at each institution
With Meghnad Saha, Bose wrote the first book in English based on German and French translations of original papers on Einstein's special and general relativity in 1919. He is seen with Niels Bohr here
Bose wrote a paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law by using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. It was seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics
He sent the article directly to Albert Einstein in Germany. Einstein translated it into German himself and submitted it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik
As a result of this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and crystallography laboratories, during which he worked with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Einstein
Bose's interpretation is now called Bose–Einstein statistics. This result derived by Bose laid the foundation of quantum statistics
Being Bengali, he devoted a lot of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language, translating scientific papers into it, and promoting the development of the region