Today, we organized a seminar at our college to celebrate the centenary of Bose statistics. This event was initiated and co-organized by the Bangiya Bijnan Parishad and the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. We had two invited talks – one by Dr. Debnarayan Jana from the University of Calcutta and the other by Dr. Manik Banik from the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. In addition, we had eight short talks by the current and past students of our college. The event was attended by about seventy people – students and teachers from our college and four other institutes. All the participants enjoyed the event immensely and had an enriching experience. Some photos from the event may be found here.

The event started with the garlanding of the picture of Prof. Satyendra Nath Bose and lighting of the lamp. Then, there were short introductory speeches by our Teacher-in-Charge, Dr. Syed Rafi Ahmed and Dr. Partha Sarathi Majumdar. After that, we had had two short talks by our students. This was followed by our two invited talks with a short lunch break in between. The event ended with six more short talks by students.

In the first talk, Dr. Debnarayan Jana discussed Bose statistics, its applications, including Bose-Einstein condensation, Bose’s work with Prof. Meghnad Saha and many stories around these topics – Bose’s mathematics exercises on the floor of his house, his 110% marks in a paper in school, his record marks in M.Sc, and many more. His talk started with the following simple exercise with numbers for the students.

• Take a three digit number whose first and last digits are unequal.
• Calculate the difference of the number and its reversed version. Take the magnitude of this.
• If the answer is not a three digit number, then multiply it by two.
• The sum of this number and its reversed version should be independent of the starting three digit number – Magic?

Dr. Jana then showed us many pictures of Bose with his immensely bright contemporaries and teachers – Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy, Megnnad Saha, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and many others. Incidentally, Dr. Jana happened to occupy the same office in Rajabazar Science College as the one which S. N. Bose occupied. We also came to know about the modest nature of Bose – referring to himself as the “one who translated the paper of generalized relativity” while writing to Einstein.

Then he went to the scientific part. He started with the black body radiation plots at different temperatures. He discussed the Saha’s visit from Allahabad as an examiner and the fact that both Saha and Bose were concerned about the pre-factor in Planck’s formula. Dr. Jana quickly went through the derivation of Planck’s formula (which has now become a standard part of the physics curriculum). He talked about Bose’s letter to Einstein and Einstein’s genius at noticing the possible divergence – which gave rise the Bose-Einstein condensation. Dr. Jana then spent some time on the first experiment which successfully prepared a Bose-Einstein condensate about seven decades after its theoretical prediction. He talked about the six-laser setup and about magnetic evaporative cooling – the technological advances without which the experiment would not be possible.

Dr. Jana also talked about the equation of state developed by Saha and Bose. A unique thing about this equation is that it simultaneously has a logarithm and an exponential. Dr. Jana talked about his own work calculating the critical exponents of the Saha-Bose equation of state. He also talked about some of his early works involving bosons and Bose statistics.

Dr. Jana’s talk ended with some more anecdotes and an interesting Q&A session.

Dr. Manik Banik, our other speaker, gave a talk titled “Nature is Nonlocal Ultimately: Einstein’s notion of Local-Realism and Bell’s Theorem”. Comparing scientists to emperors, Dr. Banik quoted George Bernard Shaw about Ptolemy’s 1400 year “reign”, Newton’s 300 year reign and about the ongoing reign of Einstein. Towards the end of his talk, Dr. Banik convinced us that unlike other scientists who proposed new theories, Bell’s reign would be unending.

Einstein’s skepticism with quantum theories is what Dr. Banik stared with. He talked about the special relativistic bound on the speed and how Newton’s theory did not respect it. He then talked about a simple entangled state – the singlet state. Using it, he went on to discuss the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment and how it apparently violated existing physical theories. He introduced the notion of hidden variables, locality and non-locality, and, that according to Bell, quantum mechanics necessitates non-locality.

Dr. Banik then tried to explain the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem. He started by talking about simple classical two player games with a referee, but with no communication between the players. The last one of these games had a maximum possible success rate less than 100%. Such bounds were introduced by Bell are now known as the Bell inequalities. Violation of them would support non-locality and hence, quantum mechanics. Dr. Banik then discussed the Nobel winning experiments done by Alain Aspect and his coworkers in 1982, breaking Bell bound.

During his talk, Dr. Banik mentioned the idea of physical reality, an idea from Einstein and said that Aspect’s experiments were the physical reality which established that Bell’s reign in the language of Bernard Shaw would be infinite. Dr. Banik’s talk also had an active Q&A session. During this time Dr. Banik re-emphasized that Einstein’s approach to testing quantum mechanics was the most scientific one. He also talked about the excellent quality of the scientific community of being happy when proven wrong, seen as an opportunity for improvement.

We had eight student presentations. There were talks by Writam Sengupta, Tripti Biswas, Samim Riyaj Sheikh, Soumi Sen, Soham Bose, Prakriti Chakraborty, Aritra Sarkar and Arnab Halder. Samim came from Presidency University and the others were our students. The students covered stories about Bose, Einstein and Saha, Bose Einstein condensation, phonons, the heat capacity curve of an ideal Bose gas, polarons in binary condensates, and many other related ideas. Goutamda (Dr. Goutam Biswas) came up with an idea of making a poster with a summary of the ideas related to Bose statistics and its applications. I helped him prepare the poster by adding a section. This was displayed on one of the walls of the room where the event took place.

The student presenters were presented books about Bose Statistics in Bengali. These were published by the Bangiya Bijnan Parishad and some of us purchased them too. Everyone had a great time and we are grateful to Bangiya Bijnan Parishad and the S. N. Bose Centre for choosing our college as a venue for these celebrations.