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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. In his letter, the 30-year-old Bose explained that he had found a more elegant way to derive one of the pivotal laws of physics (Planck’s law of radiation) and asked for Einstein’s help in publishing it. To Bose’s astonishment, Einstein replied enthusiastically. He translated Bose’s manuscript into German and arranged for it to be published in Zeitschrift für Physik, a leading physics journal of the time. Thus was born Bose-Einstein statistics, a cornerstone of quantum physics.

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 law that correctly produces Planck’s formula without taking recourse to classical physics.

Satyendra Nath Bose in Paris, France, in 1925. Courtesy the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

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. And today, Bose-Einstein statistics still describe one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, which the physicist Paul Dirac later called ‘bosons’ in honour of Bose’s contribution. Photons are bosons, as is, of course, the Higgs boson, the so-called ‘God particle’ detected in 2012. Hence, bosons are far more important than many non-physicists might realise.

The popular telling of this episode often casts Bose as a lucky outsider whose discovery was a fluke elevated by Einstein’s patronage. But Bose’s real story is actually far richer. His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges to make his historical mark. The narrow focus on his ‘accidental’ discovery overlooks the breadth of Bose’s pursuits and the context that shaped him. Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire, facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist: limited resources, isolation from international peers, and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements; instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light. His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone, but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.

Bose was born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of British-ruled India. He was the only, eldest son (among seven children) of a lower-middle-class Bengali family. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant with the East Indian Railways who had a knack for mathematics and science. His mother, Amodini Devi, although barely formally educated, managed the large household. Surendra Nath harboured nationalist sympathies; in 1901, he left his secure railway job, a position with the colonial government, to start a small chemical and pharmaceutical venture with a friend. Hence, Surendra Nath’s quiet defiance of colonial structures, and his turn towards Indian scientific enterprise, likely created a family world where a nascent nationalist milieu could thrive. This, I believe, left an enduring mark on his son.

The Bose family belonged to the Bengali Kayastha caste, which was traditionally excluded from the highest echelons of scholarship. By the late 19th century, however, social reforms of the Bengal Renaissance were loosening such barriers and opening up higher education to non-Brahmins. In this milieu of rising opportunities, young Bose demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science, coming top in his classes at university.

Working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies didn’t bind him

Bose launched his academic career just as a new era in physics was dawning, but also during the tumult of the First World War, which cut off direct intellectual contact between British India and the German scientific centres pioneering quantum theory. Bose, however, was determined to keep up with the latest developments. He taught himself German and, with the help of mentors and colleagues, obtained copies of cutting-edge European research. He devoured papers by the physicists Max Planck and Arnold Sommerfeld, and studied advanced texts, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s and J W Gibbs’s treatises on statistical mechanics. Immersing himself in these resources, Bose stayed abreast of the new quantum ideas, even as some Western scientists remained sceptical of concepts such as the light quantum (the photon). Later in life, Bose reflected that working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies of the European establishment didn’t bind him.

Bose’s early research efforts bore fruit despite the challenges. In 1918, he and Meghnad Saha, a friend from college, co-authored a paper on thermodynamics that appeared in the prestigious Philosophical Magazine, marking Bose’s first international publication. (Bose’s surname appears as Basu, reflecting contemporary transliteration practices rather than a different identity.) Around the same time, the pair undertook another ambitious project: translating several of Einstein’s groundbreaking papers on special and general relativity from German into English. This........

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