Physics

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) studied at St Xavier’s Jesuit College in Calcutta before moving on to the University of London and then Cambridge, where he was fortunate enough to study under the likes of Lord Rayleigh and Francis Darwin. A professor at Presidency College in Calcutta, he invented a radio wave coherer and, in 1895, two years before Marconi, was the first to demonstrate wireless radio transmission. The physicist Neville Mott believed he was sixty years ahead of his time. While in London at the invitation of Lord Rayleigh in January 1897, he refused to register a patent and turned down offers from Marconi’s financial partners, believing that scientific research should be motivated by the public interest, not financial gain. A keen botanist, he also developed a device for detecting the reactions of the “nervous mechanism” of plants to external stimuli, thus confirming the ideas of Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare, who published De l’électricité des végétaux (The electrification of vegetables) in 1783. In 1900, Bose presented his work at the International Congress of Physics in Paris. Two years later, at the invitation of the Société française de physique (French society of physics), he gave a lecture which was published in the Journal de physique in August of that year. By this time, his reputation was well established, and his works were regularly translated into French, with six published between 1926 and 1934.

A student of J. C. Bose at Presidency College, Sisir Kumar Mitra (1890-1963) wrote a thesis on the diffraction and interference of light under the tutelage of another great Indian physicist, C. V. Raman. He arrived in Paris in 1919 and worked on radio waves under Charles Fabry, the man who proved the existence of the ozone layer in 1913. In 1923, he defended a second thesis, written in French and entitled Détermination des étalons spectroscopiques dans la région des petites longueurs d’onde (Determination of spectroscopic standards in the short wavelength region). After a short spell at the Marie Curie Radium Institute, he continued his research at the Université de Nancy with Camille Gutton, a French physicist who specialized in radioelectricity. Mitra was in Paris at the same time as Nikhil Ranjan Sen (1894-1963), a specialist in applied mathematics, renowned physicist and pioneer of the theory of relativity, who worked with Louis de Broglie. During his travels around Europe, he also met Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

Having been taught by Jagadish Chandra Bose, who bore the same name but was of no relation, Satyendranath Bose (1894-1974) began his career in the physics department at the University of Calcutta and then at the newly established University of Dhaka. It was here that he worked on the quantum statistics of photons, which Albert Einstein, impressed by the article Bose had sent him, then applied to atoms. The subatomic particles known as bosons are named after him. With financial support from his university, he was able to spend time in Europe between 1924 and 1926, where he worked alongside Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. While working with the two great French physicists, he was able to express himself in French, a language he was fluent in, as well as in German.

The Nobel Prize, perhaps unfairly denied to both J. C. Bose and S. Bose, went to a physicist from Tamil Nadu, Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970). He began his career in the Indian Civil Service before his early work in the field of optics led to him being appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta in 1914. In 1924, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1928, he presented the conclusions of his research on light. His work was well received by the French Academy of Sciences, which made him an associate member, and by the Sorbonne University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1929. In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him”, the Raman effect.

Published in july 2024