Satyendra Nath Bose

The Story

Bose was a brilliant student of physics in Calcutta who, in 1924, wrote a paper deriving Planck's law of black-body radiation by treating light as a gas of particles — a derivation that differed from the established approach in a subtle but revolutionary way. Unable to get it published in Europe, he sent it to Albert Einstein, who translated it into German himself and had it published, adding his own extension.

The joint work produced the Bose-Einstein statistics — describing particles, later called bosons, that can occupy the same state — and predicted the Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter created in laboratories in 1995, seventy years later. Einstein and Bose's collaboration is among the most famous in physics.

Bose returned to Bhārat, where he taught at Dacca and Calcutta universities and worked in many fields — including X-ray crystallography and nuclear physics. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan and served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. He died in 1974, and in 2012, when the Higgs particle was confirmed at CERN, the world's headlines carried the name of the particle class — boson — after the physicist of Bhārat.