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Transnational Quantum: Quantum Physics in India through the Lens of Satyendranath Bose

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Abstract

This paper traces the social and cultural dimensions of quantum physics in colonial India where Satyendranath Bose worked. By focusing on Bose’s approach towards the quantum and his collaboration with Albert Einstein, I argue that his physics displayed both the localities of doing science in early twentieth century India as well as a cosmopolitan dimension. He transformed the fundamental new concept of the light quantum developed by Einstein in 1905 within the social and political context of colonial India. This cross-pollination of the local with the global is termed here as the locally rooted cosmopolitan nature of Bose’s science. The production of new knowledge through quantum statistics by Bose show the co-constructed nature of physics and the transnational nature of the quantum.

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Notes

  1. Bose found the probability of an interaction P = (N s dν s )/(A s  + N s dν s ) = (n/n + 1), where n = N ν /A ν represents the average number of quanta per cell, ν is the frequency, A is the spontaneous emission constant, and N s is the number of light quanta of energy hν s .

References

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  10. Bose was the eldest child and only son; he had six younger sisters. He inherited many good qualities and noble aspirations from his parents, and he more than fulfilled their expectations of him. Their happiness was great when the poet Rabindranath Tagore invited their son to Santiniketan and dedicated his Visva-Parichaya (1937), a book which provides an elementary account of the cosmic and microcosmic world in Bengali, to Bose in recognition of his efforts to popularize science through the mother tongue. See also Melvyn Brown, Satyen Bose: A Life (Calcutta: Annapurna Publishing House, 1974).

  11. Chitrarekha Gupta, The Kayasthas: A Study in the Formation and Early History of a Caste (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1996). Caste is a system of social stratification in India. Tithi Bhattacharya, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85) (Oxford University Press, 2005). Within the Indian caste hierarchy, the Kayasthas were employed as scribes, accountants, and record keepers but would not be permitted to marry the Brahmins or socially dine with them. Although traditionally the Brahmins were the priestly class and had a direct route to education and science, with the emergent Bengal Renaissance, other castes like the Kayasthas, to which Bose belonged, were also getting gradual access to education and science. Other notable examples include one of Bose’s key mentors Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was a physicist cum plant physiologist.

  12. Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture (ref. 11).

  13. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

  14. Subrata Dasgupta, The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).

  15. C. K. Majumdar, ed., S. N. Bose: The Man and His Works, pt. 2, Life, Lectures and Addresses, Miscellaneous Pieces (Calcutta: S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, 1994).

  16. As stated by Lord Apthill, a chief administrator in Calcutta, in 1903. See Bidyut Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932-47: Contour of Freedom (London: Routledge, 2004), 87.

  17. Somaditya Banerjee, “C. V. Raman and Colonial Physics: Acoustics and the Quantum,” Physics in Perspective 16 (2014) 146–78.

  18. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 83.

  19. Ibid., 107.

  20. Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendranath Bose were not related. “Bose” is a common last name within the Bengali community in Bengal and India and belongs to the Kayastha caste.

  21. Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co., 1901).

  22. S. N. Bose, “Acharya Prafullachandra Smarane” (in Bengali) originally published in Jnan O Vijnan, August 1961. Reprinted in S. N. Bose: The Man and His Work, pt. 2, Life, Lectures and Addresses, Miscellaneous Pieces, ed. Santimay Chatterjee, C. K. Majumdar, Partha Ghose, Enakshi Chatterjee, and Sarnik Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta: S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, 1994).

  23. Majumdar, S. N. Bose (ref. 15), chs. 4–6.

  24. B. N. Prasad, Science and Culture 1 (August 1935), 142–45.

  25. Calcutta University, accessed March 28, 2016, http://www.caluniv-ucsta.net/.

  26. Hindustan Review and Kayastha Samachar 8 (November 1903), 466.

  27. M. N. Saha, “Obituary: Dr. Brühl,” Science and Culture 1 (1935), 21–30.

  28. Jagdish Mehra, “Satyendra Nath Bose,” Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society 21 (1975), 117–54, on 120.

  29. Two teams of British astronomers conducted tests during the solar eclipse of May 1919 to measure the effect of the sun’s gravitational field on light traveling to the earth from distant stars. Their calculations were announced six months later, at a joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society on November 6, 1919. Katy Price, Loving Faster than Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), argues that “the one key feature of the new space and time that stood out was that almost nobody could understand or explain it” (1).

  30. A. Einstein and H. Minkowski, The Principle of Relativity, trans. M. N. Saha and S. N. Bose (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920).

  31. Tomas Irish, The University at War, 1914–25: Britain, France and the United States (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  32. Einstein and Minkowski, Relativity (ref. 30), 456.

  33. N. Bohr, “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation and the Structure of the Atom,” Philosophical Magazine 30 (1915), 394–415.

  34. A. Sommerfeld, “Zur Quantentheorie der Spektrallinien,” Annalen der Physik 51 (1916), 1–94; A. Sommerfeld and W. Kossel, “Auswahlprinzip und verschiebungssatz bei serienspektren,” Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 21 (1919), 240–59.

  35. S. N. Bose, “On the Deduction of Rydberg’s Law from the Quantum Theory of Spectral Emission,” Philosophical Magazine 40 (1920), 619.

  36. Partha Ghose, oral history interview with the author, January 16, 2012.

  37. Santimay Chatterjee, Satyendranath Bose (Calcutta: National Book Trust, 2005), 40.

  38. In 1896, Wien proposed the concrete function that came to be known as the Wien radiation law. Planck, working on this topic, had first derived the Wien radiation law in 1899. In October 1900, Rubens and Kurlbaum informed Planck about problems with the Wien law for long wavelengths. Planck produced a new law, interpolating a curve that worked for long wavelengths (the Rayleigh-Jeans law) with a curve that worked for short wavelengths (the Wien radiation law). The new law met critical requirements (i.e., the Stefan-Boltzmann law and the Wien displacement law) and was in excellent agreement with experimental data. In the aftermath of the experimental results of October 19, 1900, Kurlbaum presented at the session of the German Physical Society in Berlin, December 14, 1900, Planck presented his derivation of his new black-body radiation law (“On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum”).

  39. Historians like Thomas Kuhn have asked is whether Planck quantized his resonators. The answer depends on the interpretation of Planck’s counting procedure. The standard interpretation of Martin Klein claims Planck did quantize his resonators. An alternative interpretation by Kuhn argues Planck did not. Kuhn argues that it was shown later by Einstein in 1905–1906 that only the standard interpretation leads to the Planck’s radiation law. But Planck did not realize that in 1900. The upshot, for Kuhn, was that Planck did not quantize much of anything. Quantum theory was not launched by Planck in 1900, but by Einstein in 1905. Here I follow Kuhn rather than Klein. See also Peter Galison, “Kuhn and the Quantum Controversy,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1981), 71–84 and Clayton A. Gearhart, “Planck, the Quantum, and the Historians,” Physics in Perspective 4 (2002), 170–215.

  40. S. N. Bose, “Planck’s Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese,” Zeitschrift für Physik 26 (1924), 178–81.

  41. The constant c is the speed of light, K is Boltzmann’s Constant, and h is Planck’s constant. See John Stachel, Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’ (Boston: Birkhauser, 2001), 519–38.

  42. Max Planck, letter to Robert Wood, October 7, 1931, quoted in N. Robotti, “The Search for Universal Constants and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics,” in The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: Historical Analysis and Open Questions, ed. Claudio Garola and Arcangelo Rossi, (Singapore: World Scientific, 2000), 343–54, on 349.

  43. Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, vol. 1, pt. 2, The Quantum Theory of Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Sommerfeld: Its Foundation and the Rise of its Difficulties 1900–1925 (Berlin: Springer, 1982), 564.

  44. Peter Pesic, “Quantum Identity,” American Scientist 90(3) (2002), 262–67; Olivier Darrigol, “Statistics and Combinatorics in Early Quantum Theory,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 21 (1991), 237–98.

  45. Mehra and Rechenberg, Development of Quantum Theory (ref. 43), 565.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Bose initially submitted his manuscript to the editors of British journal Philosophical Magazine, who ignored it. This has been confirmed by Partha Ghose in an interview with the author at Calcutta (Jan 16, 2012). William Blanpied, however, claims in his article that after six months the editors of the journal informed Bose that the referee’s report on the paper was negative. Blanpied confirms it in a private communication with the author. According to Philosophical Magazine, no editorial record exists for this period. William A. Blanpied, “Satyendranath Bose: Co-Founder of Quantum Statistics,” American Journal of Physics 40 (1972), 1212–20. For the “shot in the dark” argument see Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord…: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  48. Majumdar, S. N. Bose (ref. 15), 48.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Satyendranath Bose, letter to Albert Einstein, June 4, 1924, Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, doc. 6-127.

  52. Majumdar, S. N. Bose (ref. 15), 52.

  53. Rodney Loudon, The Quantum Theory of Light, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ghose, interview (ref. 36).

  54. Ibid. See also James D. Bjorken and Sidney D. Drell, Relativisitic Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965).

  55. Albert Einstein, “Strahlungs-Emission und -Absorption nach der Quantentheorie,” Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 18 (1916), 318–23.

  56. Ghose, interview (ref. 36).

  57. S. N. Bose National Center for Basic Sciences, Kolkata, India, exhibit 0167.

  58. Majumdar, S. N. Bose (ref. 15), 53–54.

  59. Partha Ghose, “Bose Statistics: A Historical Perspective,” in Majumdar, S. N. Bose (ref. 15), 35–71.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Roger Stuewer, The Compton Effect: Turning Point in Physics (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 268. For the argument that several physicists accepted the Compton effect, but were just as happy to consider light as waves, see Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen, “On the Verge of Umdeutung in Minnesota: Van Vleck and the Correspondence Principle,” 2 pts., Archive for History of Exact Sciences 61 (2007), 553–624; 625–671.

  62. Adheesh Sathaye, “‘Higher’ Learning,” Indologica 30 (2004), 253–64.

  63. Paul A. M. Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1947). See also Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

  64. Moni Bagchee, Bijñānasādhaka Satyena Bosa (Calcutta: Annapurna Publishing House, 1974); William Blanpied, “Satyendranath Bose: Co-Founder of Quantum Statistics,” American Journal of Physics 40 (1972), 1212–20; Santimay Chatterjee and Enakshi Chatterjee, Satyendra Nath Bose (Calcutta: National Book Trust, 2005); Mehra, “Bose” (ref. 28).

  65. George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967), 611–22; John Hendry, The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984).

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Acknowledgments

I thank David Cassidy, Alexei Kojevnikov, Michel Janssen, Robert Brain, Daniel Kennefick, Partha Ghose, the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, the editors of Physics in Perspective, and the anonymous referees for their comments and mentoring in writing this paper. I also acknowledge support from a Seed Grant from the Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) and an Olsson Grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at the University of Idaho.

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    Somaditya Banerjee

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Correspondence to Somaditya Banerjee.

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Somaditya “Soma” Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Idaho. He earned a PhD in history from University of British Columbia in 2013. His forthcoming book, The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India, will be published by Routledge Press in 2017.

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Banerjee, S. Transnational Quantum: Quantum Physics in India through the Lens of Satyendranath Bose. Phys. Perspect. 18, 157–181 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-016-0182-3

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