Satyendra NATH Bose
An Indian physicist who was born in Calcutta in 1894, Satyendra Bose is best known for devising a set of rules for how a special type of particle behaves. Today, these particles are known as bosons – named after Bose – but in the early 1920s, no one was quite sure why certain particles like photons behaved differently than other particles like electrons. Moreover, photons didn’t behave anything the way scientists predicted photons should behave.
One day Bose put together a demonstration for a class he was teaching to describe why the mathematical theory about photons didn’t agree with the observation, but he made a statistical “mistake.” His mistake was the equivalent of suggesting that if you flip a coin repeatedly it will come up heads 2/3 of the time – but this “mistake” amazingly made the theory work. Now it predicted the correct behavior for photons.
Bose realized there must be a whole new kind of statistical rules that governed particles like photons. He had trouble getting his paper published, since people thought this new kind of statistics was fantastically wrong – but Albert Einstein thought Bose was right, and helped get his paper published. Later Einstein realized these new statistics applied to certain atoms as well – such atoms are also “bosons.” Einstein went on to discover something even more curious. At extremely cold temperatures close to absolute zero, Bose’s statistics predicted that these atoms would join up into a single giant atom – today known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. It wasn’t until decades later, in 1995, that Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle finally managed to make atoms cold enough to form the first Bose-Einstein condensate.
