Satyendranath Bose, born in Calcutta in 1894, is among the great Indian physicists who made a fundamental contribution to the advance of science in the twentieth century. An outstanding student throughout, Bose started his career in 1916 as a lecturer in physics in Calcutta University; five years later he joined Dacca University. Here in 1924, in a brilliant flash of insight, Bose gave a new derivation of Planck’s law, treating radiation as a gas of photons and employing new statistical methods of counting of photon states. He wrote a short paper on the subject and sent it to Einstein who immediately recognised its great significance, translated it in German and forwarded it for publication. Einstein then applied the same method to a gas of molecules.The key new conceptual ingredient in Bose’s work was that the particles were regarded as indistinguishable, a radical departure from the assumption that underlies the classical Maxwell Boltzmann statistics. It was soon realised that the new Bose-Einstein statistics was applicable to particles with integers spins, and a new quantum statistics (Fermi-Dirac statistics) was needed for particles with half integers spins satisfying Pauli’s exclusion principle. Particles with integers spins are now known as bosons in honour of Bose.An important consequence of Bose-Einstein statistics is that a gas of molecules below a certain temperature will undergo a phase transition to a state where a large fraction of atoms populate the same lowest energy state. Some seventy years were to pass before the pioneering ideas of Bose, developed further by Einstein, were dramatically confirmed in the observation of a new state of matter in a dilute gas of ultra cold alkali atoms - the Bose-Eintein condensate.
