Google on June 4 created a special doodle to celebrate Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and his contribution to the Bose-Einstein statistics. Bose sent his theory to Albert Einstein on this day in 1924 who immediately recognised it as a significant discovery in quantum mechanics.
Born on January 1, 1894, Bose studied in Calcutta and was brilliant in his studies. It was his academic achievements that made him famous. Bose's father encouraged his interest in mathematics by writing an arithmetic problem for him to solve before leaving for work every day, said a blog post by Google. At age 15, Bose began pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree at Calcutta’s Presidency College and earned a Master’s in Applied Mathematics at the University of Calcutta soon after.
At 22, Bose was appointed lecturer in Calcutta University, along with astrophysicist Meghnad Saha. By the end of 1917, Bose began giving lectures on physics. In 1921, he joined the then newly created Dacca University as Reader in Physics. He had a couple of papers published by the same journal earlier, co-authored with Saha. It was here while teaching that he documented his findings in a report called Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta. Even though his research was rejected by a journal, he decided to mail his paper to Albert Einstein.
Einstein recognised the significance of Bose’s theory and generalised it to a wider range of phenomena, and the theory came to be known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
His contributions to physics were recognised by the Indian government by awarding him the Padma Vibhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in the country. He was also appointed as National Professor, the highest honour in India for scholars.
In honour of Bose’s legacy, any particle that obeys the Bose Einstein statistics is called a boson. His theory is a cornerstone of condensed matter physics.
