Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Trivia #12 : The Indian who impressed Einstein

When I was talking to a close friend of mine about this blog and solicited his advise regarding how it could be bettered he immediately retorted back by asking me to post some trivia related to India. I had been posting trivia about American history, a Dutch queen, an Argentinian revolutionary and even about an African first lady but nothing about India yet. This had to be amended. And here it has been.




Our Guy is a legendary Indian scientist who stands next to Jawaharlal Nehru in the above picture.

He was born in Kolkata and studied physics under Jagdish Chandra Bose, who is considered to be one of the fathers of radio science and Prafulla Chandra Ray, who is the founder of India's first pharmaceutical company.

He was interested in Einstein's works from his college days. This led to him to write a research paper in which he derived the Planck's Quantum Radiation law without any reference to classical physics. But unable to get his paper published in any journal he then sent the paper to Einstein himself. Einstein who was impressed with it translated it into german and submitted it to a reputed science journal of that time on Our Guy's behalf and got it published.

This turned out to be the turning point in Our Guy's career. He then traveled to Europe and started to collaborate with the likes of Einstein, Marie Curie etc.

We would have heard about the serendipitous discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming. Our Guy too had his moment of serendipity.

While delivering a lecture on photoelectric effect in the University of Dhaka, Our Guy while trying to show that the current theory is inadequate to explain the concerned phenomenon committed a mistake in applying the theory. But the predictions given by the wrongly applied theory were proved experimentally. This led Our Guy to write a seminal paper on it, but as usual he was not able to publish it as it was thought to be a borne out of a mistake.

Here too Einstein came to Our Guy's rescue by asking a reputed science journal to publish Our Guy's paper along with his own, on the same topic. This led to the formulation of "Our Guy's name"-Einstein statistics. Then Einstein extended this statistics to atoms and predicted that certain subatomic particles would exist altogether in a different state of matter under certain conditions.

The ultimate recognition for Our Guy's work came when that subatomic particle later proved to exist, was named after him.

Our guy was the President of Indian Science Congress in 1944. He was also a Fellow of The Royal Society of UK.

Who is Our Guy?

2 comments:

  1. U r right bro.
    It is Satyendra Nath Bose.
    The sub-atomic particle named after him is Boson.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson

    ReplyDelete