Kolkata, Jan 1 (UNI) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday paid tribute to famous scientist Satyendra Nath Bose on his birth anniversary.
“Tribute to Satyendra Nath Bose, famous physicist and mathematician, on his birth anniversary,” Ms Banerjee posted on her social networking page.
Bose, the legendary Indian Physicist, the National Professor and the father of Boson was born on January 1, 1894 in Calcutta (presently Kolkata).
The name of Satyendra Nath Bose today is immortalised in the history of science by the coinages like Bose Statistics, Bose-Einstein Condensation and Higgs boson. In popular parlance, the Higgs boson is acclaimed as the God Particle – a source of mass for all fundamental particles.
A brilliant student, Bose always stood first in his school and college exams. His record M.Sc performance at Calcutta University is yet to be surpassed.
In pre-independence Bengal, Professor Bose held positions at the Universities of Dhaka and Calcutta, for carrying out pioneering studies on the most internationally advanced topics in Physics at the time.
Professor Bose and Professor Meghnad Saha were the first to translate Einstein's Theory of Relativity into English. He soon developed research expertise on the then newly emerging subject of Quantum Physics.
In 1924, Professor Bose performed a path-breaking work on foundations of Quantum Statistics, laying a basis of modern Atomic Theory.
He communicated an article, “Planck's law and the Light-Quantum hypothesis” to Albert Einstein.
Realizing the immense importance of this work, Einstein translated it into German, and arranged for it to be published in the highly reputed journal under Bose's singular name.
Einstein also added a note at the end of the paper, ``In my opinion Bose’s derivation signifies an important advance. The method used here gives the quantum theory of an ideal gas as I will work out elsewhere”.
"India is like a historic father of the project," said Paolo Giubellino, spokesman of the Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN), which conducted the experiments to findthe elusive 'God' particle.
According to Einstein's biographer Abraham Pais, this work is regarded as one among the last four revolutionary papers on old Quantum Theory, the other three belonging to Planck, Einstein and Bohr.
The fundamental importance of his work may be gauged from the fact that several Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded subsequently to researchers carrying forward his ideas to diverse physical applications.
Bose's work acted a forerunner to the subsequent advances in many branches of modern quantum mechanics.
After Bose’s paper, there was a flood of new developments: the extension of Bose’s theory by Einstein to ideal gases, the Fermi-Dirac statistics for electrons, the quantisation of the electromagnetic field by Heisenberg and Pauli, and quantum electrodynamics by Dirac.
Bose followed up his paper by another more exhaustive paper where he generalised not only his ideas but also Einstein’s. In these two papers Bose laid the basic principles and foundations of a quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, one of the crowning achievements of twentieth century physics.
The fundamental importance of his work may be gauged from the fact that several Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded subsequently to researchers carrying forward his ideas to diverse physical applications.
In recent years, the notable among them are Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wofgang Ketterle in 2001 for their work on Bose-Einstein Condensation, and Francois Englert and Peter Higgs jointly in 2013 for the discovery of the Higgs boson.
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