Satyen Bose, the unsung hero of Indian Physics..Copied from The Hindu

Satyen Bose, the unsung hero

S. Gurumanickam

 

When his meticulously researched paper sent for publication was returned by the Philosophical Magazine from London with not-so-flattering remarks, Satyendranath Bose did not lose heart. He was so sure of his finding. This was in 1924.

Born on January 1, 1894, Bose studied in Calcutta and was brilliant in his studies. His classmate was the other great (also forgotten) Meghnad Saha, and the legendary Jagdish Chandra Bose was his teacher.

At 22, Bose was appointed lecturer in Calcutta University, along with Saha. 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 wrote this paper for deriving the Planck's Law. His paper was titled ‘Planck's Law and Light Quantum Hypothesis.'

Golden period

The early decades of 1900 were a golden period in the growth of science. It was teeming with great scientists in the western world competing with one another creditably. This was the period when classical sciences such as physics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine were outpacing one another, despite little and inefficient communication. The Moore's law of today would pale into insignificance if we apply it to that period.

In 1900, Max Planck explained in the theory of black body radiation that light is emitted in discrete amounts (quanta) rather than as a continuous wave. But his derivation of this formula was not satisfactory to other scientists, in fact even to himself. However, his formula held true to everyone's surprise.

Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize-winning paper explained the photoelectric effect based on Planck's quanta as photons in 1905. (Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for this paper, not for his papers on Relativity!) But many of his colleagues were not fully convinced of his yet-to-be-developed photon theory. The world was waiting for a new theory on fundamental particles to fill the gaps.

Under these circumstances, Bose re-sent the paper to Albert Einstein in June 1924, with a fervent appeal for his perusal and opinion. “Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request,” he wrote. (He was being modest; he had earlier translated Einstein's Relativity papers into English with Einstein's permission). Little could he have foreseen the impact this was going to have.

Einstein immediately recognised the significance of this paper. This paper was going to substantiate and revolutionise his theory of photoelectric effect. Einstein himself translated Bose's paper into German and sent it to Zeitschrift für Physik with his endorsement for publication. With his demigod status, Einstein's words carried much weight. It was promptly published, and immediately Bose shot into prominence.

Seminal phenomenon

Einstein personally invited Bose to work with him, and their efforts culminated in the Bose-Einstein statistics, an important and seminal phenomenon in quantum physics.

His work was wholeheartedly supported and appreciated by the leading lights in quantum theory, such as Louise de Broglie, Erwin Schroedinger, Paul Dirac and Heisenburg.

In honour of Bose' (and every Indian), Paul Dirac coined the word ‘Boson' for those particles which obey Bose's statistics. In atomic theory, only Fermions (named after Enrico Fermi) and Bosons were named after physicists. What a wonderful distinction conferred on our great scientist.

He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 — and forgotten afterwards.

This is not intended to be a scientific article, but a grim reminder of our apathy to our eminent scientists who had toiled with great shortcomings, yet came out with flying colours. J.C. Bose, P.C. Ray, M. Saha, C.V. Raman and countless other yesteryear scientists, who had achieved so much, were acclaimed internationally, yet ignored and were in oblivion at home.

Is it not a shame that Bose is known more to westerners (even now) than to Indians? How many of us are aware of his communication to Einstein and the subsequent events. It is perplexing why this little incident of Bose sending his paper to Einstein has not found a place in our schoolbooks!

We overlook scientists and their achievements. Yet we don't fail to adulate and elevate Tendulkars, A.R. Rahmans, Kamal Hasans and Khans for their achievements on the screen/ in entertainment. No complaints. Just why don't we extend this courtesy to our real achievers?

We, Indians, are blessed with many festivals to celebrate. Quite a few are new years! Apart from January 1, we have many new years, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, etc. Of these, we chose unanimously to celebrate the astronomically insignificant date of January 1 as our own, and bash up our streets with unrestrained celebration with booze, dance and gaiety.

Why cannot January 1, birthday of Satyendranath Bose, be celebrated also as a National Scientist Day? Our National Science Day falls on February 28 in remembrance of the Raman Effect.

Nobel Prize in Medicine..1979

Werner Arber

Daniel Nathans

Hamilton O. Smith

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1978 was awarded jointly to Werner Arber, Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith "for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics".

More of Serendipitous discoveries in Medicine and Surgery.

Pharmacology has a particularly rich history of serendipity. The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming is the best known example. Similarly, the concept that certain chemicals can be used to cure cancer developed after soldiers exposed to mustard gas in World War II developed reduced numbers of white cells in the blood, leading to the use of the chemically related nitrogen mustard as an anti-leukemic drug. The hallucinogenic properties of LSD unfolded when Albert Hoffmann ingested some accidentally while working to develop a drug to control hemorrhage after childbirth and migraine. Serendipity even has a major role in Arthur Hailey's novel Strong medicine in the discovery of an aphrodisiac. In an example of life imitating art, the ability of the new anti-impotence drug sildenafil (Viagra) was discovered accidentally during a search for a cardiovascular vasodilator.
Examples of serendipity also exist in surgery. Microvascular surgery originated when had to join small blood vessels in a dog during an experiment. Realizing that this required the help of a microscope, he proceeded to use one — but also recognized its potential for surgical practice. Another example of serendipity is the surgical glove, developed by Julius H. Jacobson IIWilliam Halsted to prevent his operation-room nurse (whom he subsequently married) from developing dermatitis due to the mercuric chloride used for asepsis. Halsted asked the Goodyear Rubber Company to fashion thin rubber gloves for her. That post-operative infections decreased following the use of gloves was a later but much more useful offshoot of this invention.

More of Serendipitous discoveries in Medivine

Accidental Discoveries Accidents in medicine: The idea sends chills down your spine as you conjure up thoughts of misdiagnoses, mistakenly prescribed drugs, and wrongly amputated limbs. Yet while accidents in the examining room or on the operating table can be regrettable, even tragic, those that occur in the laboratory can sometimes lead to spectacular advances, life-saving treatments, and Nobel Prizes.

A seemingly insignificant finding by one researcher leads to a breakthrough discovery by another; a physician methodically pursuing the answer to a medical conundrum over many years suddenly has a "Eureka" moment; a scientist who chooses to study a contaminant in his culture rather than tossing it out stumbles upon something entirely new. Here we examine three of medical history's most fortuitous couplings of great minds and great luck.

A laborer scrapes the bark from a cinchona tree. The bark is then sundried and pulverized to make the drug quinine.

Quinine
The story behind the chance discovery of the anti-malarial drug quinine may be more legend than fact, but it is nevertheless a story worthy of note. The account that has gained the most currency credits a South American Indian with being the first to find a medical application for quinine. According to legend, the man unwittingly ingested quinine while suffering a malarial fever in a jungle high in the Andes. Needing desperately to quench his thirst, he drank his fill from a small, bitter-tasting pool of water. Nearby stood one or more varieties of cinchona, which grows from Colombia to Bolivia on humid slopes above 5,000 feet. The bark of the cinchona, which the indigenous people knew as quina-quina, was thought to be poisonous. But when this man's fever miraculously abated, he brought news of the medicinal tree back to his tribe, which began to use its bark to treat malaria.

Since the first officially noted use of quinine to fight malaria occurred in a community of Jesuit missionaries in Lima, Peru in 1630, historians have surmised that Indian tribes taught the missionaries how to extract the chemical quinine from cinchona bark. In any case, the Jesuits' use of quinine as a malaria medication was the first documented use of a chemical compound to successfully treat an infectious disease. To this day, quinine-based anti-malarials are widely used as effective treatments against the growth and reproduction of malarial parasites in humans.

A depiction of Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps, a boy of eight, on May 14, 1796.

Smallpox vaccination
In 1796, Edward Jenner, a British scientist and surgeon, had a brainstorm that ultimately led to the development of the first vaccine. A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge.
With this in mind, Jenner took samples from the open cowpox sores on the hands of a young dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with pus he extracted from Nelmes' sores. (Experimenting on a child would be anathema today, but this was the 18^th century.) The boy developed a slight fever and a few lesions but remained for the most part unscathed. A few months later, Jenner gave the boy another injection, this one containing smallpox. James failed to develop the disease, and the idea behind the modern vaccine was born.

Though doctors and scientists would not begin to understand the biological basis of immunity for at least 50 years after Jenner's first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide.

Physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923), discoverer of the X-ray.

X-Rays
X-rays have become an important tool for medical diagnoses, but their discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had little to do with medical experimentation. Röntgen was studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs. One earlier scientist had found that cathode rays can penetrate thin pieces of metal, while another showed that these rays could light up a fluorescent screen placed an inch or two away from a thin aluminum "window" in the glass tube.
 

Röntgen wanted to determine if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. While performing this experiment, Röntgen noticed that a glow appeared in his darkened laboratory several feet away from his cardboard-covered glass tube. At first he thought a tear in the paper sheathing was allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the cathode-ray tube to escape. But he soon realized he had happened upon something entirely different. Rays of light were passing right through the thick paper and appearing on a fluorescent screen over a yard away.
Röntgen found that this new ray, which had many characteristics different from the cathode ray he had been studying, could penetrate solids and even record the image of a human skeleton on a photographic negative. In 1901, the first year of the Nobel Prize, Röntgen won for his accidental discovery of what he called the "X-ray," which physicians worldwide soon adopted as a standard medical tool.