From Aeon, January 20:
A light from the periphery
The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters
On a summer day in 1924, a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper and a letter to Albert Einstein. It would shape the nascent field of quantum mechanics and secure Bose a place in the annals of scientific history.
At the time, Bose was teaching in colonial India, thousands of miles from the centres of European science. In his letter, the 30-year-old Bose explained that he had found a more elegant way to derive one of the pivotal laws of physics (Planck’s law of radiation) and asked for Einstein’s help in publishing it. To Bose’s astonishment, Einstein replied enthusiastically. He translated Bose’s manuscript into German and arranged for it to be published in Zeitschrift für Physik, a leading physics journal of the time. Thus was born Bose-Einstein statistics, a cornerstone of quantum physics.
What made it so significant? In plain terms, Bose devised a new way to count and describe the behaviour of identical quantum particles, most famously, particles of light called photons. Unlike marbles or other distinguishable objects, these particles don’t insist on personal space: they can crowd into the same state rather than each occupying a unique state. Bose showed that treating particles as indistinguishable leads to a new statistical law that correctly produces Planck’s formula without taking recourse to classical physics.
Einstein was so impressed with this idea that he applied it to atoms, predicting a strange new state of matter – what we now call a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where particles clump into the same state at low temperatures. BECs are important because they enable direct study of the quantum world, the creation of new states of matter and testing of fundamental theories, and have real-world implications for quantum computing, atomic clocks and other emerging quantum technologies. And today, Bose-Einstein statistics still describe one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, which the physicist Paul Dirac later called ‘bosons’ in honour of Bose’s contribution. Photons are bosons, as is, of course, the Higgs boson, the so-called ‘God particle’ detected in 2012. Hence, bosons are far more important than many non-physicists might realise....
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