ABSTRACT
Using the work of Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose, as a lens, this chapter will explore how fundamentally new concepts of German quantum physics transformed and established roots in different cultural and political circumstances, namely the conditions of colonial India. Additionally, it explores how a physicist from colonial India shaped German physics by establishing Bose–Einstein statistics.
As this chapter will display, Bose’s derivation of the Planck’s Law vindicated a view Einstein had championed for roughly nineteen years. Nor was it just a “shot in the dark” that triggered Bose’s insight, as Abraham Pais has suggested. Bose was very much aware that his result was a logical development of Einstein’s work, an insight that had eluded Einstein himself for nearly two decades. Nevertheless, Bose was working in an isolated fashion in a remote colony—standing apart from Maxwellian physics—where he was dependent on texts and journals circulated from Europe by émigrés such as P. J. Brühl. As a result, Bose not only knew how to appeal to common thought within the physics community, but also was isolated enough to be free from the temptation of rejecting Einstein’s outlook in order to appease scientific orthodoxy. Furthermore, in order to appreciate Bose’s approach, the idea of local Visvajaneenata Cosmopolitanism helps flesh out how a colonial scientist, working within a power differential, generated new knowledge, and engaged with a metropolitan scientist like Albert Einstein. Bose-Einstein statistics showed essentially the interconnected nature of Indian and German physics.
