Bose, Satyendra Nath (1894-1974)

Jan 01, 1894 - Feb 04, 1974
Born Calcutta, India. Died ??

Satyendra Nath Bose was born on New Year's day in 1894. He was the eldest son and the only son of his parents. Having done his initial schooling in a neighbouring elementary school in Calcutta, Bose enetered the Presidency College in 1909. He enrolled in science courses, and J.C. Bose was his Phyaics teacher there. Meghnad Saha was Bose's contemporary at Presidency College and P.C. Mahalanobis was one year senior. Bose took his B.Sc examination in 1913 and his M.Sc examination in 1915. He stood first in both the examinations, the second place going to Meghnad Saha.

In 1916, along with Saha , he was appointed as a lecturer in the University College by Sir Asutosh Mookerjee. While teaching relativity to the students of Mathematics, he took the opportunity to translate Einstein's paper on general relativity. In 1921, Bose left Calcutta to become a Reader at the Dacca University. It was during this period that he wrote the famous paper on the statistics of photons. It was named Bose statistics after him and is now an integral part of physics. Dirac coined the term boson for particles obeying these statistics.

In 1921 Bose went to Paris on study leave to work in the laboratories of Mme Curie. Later he went to Berlin where he met Einstein. He returned to Dacca in 1926 and became Professor. Shortly before Independence, Bose returned to Calcutta to become the Khaira Professor of Physics, he post he kept till 1956. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958, And the Government of India named him a Natioal Professor the following year. He was awarded the honow of Padma Vibhushan by the President of India.

In his famous paper on the statistics of photons, Bose derieved Planck's Law of Radiation by proposing different states for the photon. He also proposed that there is no conservation of the number of photons. Instead of statistical independence of particles, Bose put particles into cells and talked about statistical independence of cells. Einstein generalized it to the counting of states of atoms, and predicted the phenomena of Bose-Einstein condensation , which has now been experimentally confirmed.

Bose passed away in 1974.