Why Satyendra Nath Bose was more than Einstein's sidekick | Aeon Essays

"On a summer day in 1924, a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper and a letter to Albert Einstein. It would shape the nascent field of quantum mechanics and secure Bose a place in the annals of scientific history. At the time, Bose was teaching in colonial India, thousands of miles from the centres of European science."

"What made it so significant? In plain terms, Bose devised a new way to count and describe the behaviour of identical quantum particles, most famously, particles of light called photons. Unlike marbles or other distinguishable objects, these particles don't insist on personal space: they can crowd into the same state rather than each occupying a unique state. Bose showed that treating particles as indistinguishable leads to a new statistical lawthat correctly produces Planck's formula without taking recourse to classical physics."

"Einstein was so impressed with this idea that he applied it to atoms, predicting a strange new state of matter - what we now call a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where particles clump into the same state at low temperatures. BECs are important because they enable direct study of the quantum world, the creation of new states of matter and testing of fundamental theories, and have real-world implications for quantum computing, atomic clocks and other emerging quantum technologies."

Satyendra Nath Bose, a 30-year-old Indian physicist in 1924, derived Planck's law using a novel counting method for identical particles and sought Einstein's help to publish it. Albert Einstein translated and arranged the paper's publication in Zeitschrift für Physik, giving rise to Bose-Einstein statistics. The statistics describe indistinguishable quantum particles such as photons, which can occupy the same quantum state rather than being forced into distinct states. Einstein applied the idea to atoms and predicted the Bose-Einstein condensate, a low-temperature state where particles clump into a single quantum state. Bose-Einstein statistics underpin one of the two fundamental particle classes and enable advances in quantum technologies.

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