Scientists

Satyendra Nath Bose

If you make a landmark discovery, but no journal is willing to publish it, what do you do? If you are Satyendra Nath Bose, you send it to the most famous scientist in the world.

Life

Satyendra Nath was born on 1st January, 1894 in Kolkata. He went to Hindu School and then Presidency College, and ranked the first in both places. At Presidency College, he met great scientists like Jagdish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Roy, who inspired him to take up a career in scientific research.
In 1916, he became a lecturer at the University of Calcutta, and in 1921 moved on to Dhaka University as Professor of Physics. While explaining a concept of quantum theory in a lecture, he made a mistake. But later on, he thought he hadn’t made a mistake but was quite right, because it explained some facts which the older theory could not. He wrote down his thoughts as a scientific article. Journals refused to publish it, because they said it was a mistake. Frustrated, he sent his paper to Albert Einstein.
Einstein agreed that it wasn’t a mistake but the truth. He translated it into German and published it in a German journal. This made Bose very famous, and he got invites from European physicists to visit them. He travelled to Europe in 1924-26. After India’s partition he shifted to Kolkata, where he taught at the university till his retirement in 1956. He died in 1974.

Bose-Einstein Condensate

In ordinary physics, each particle is distinct from each other. You can track each particle. This is true of all big and small things like planets, rubber balls and even grains of dust. But when we go into smaller scales, like sub-atomic particles (like electrons), the ordinary rules don’t apply. The particles become indistinguishable, and so we cannot track them. This is the realm of quantum physics.
S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein together developed many of the principles that apply in quantum physics. These are together known as Bose-Einstein Statistics. While this science is quit difficult, it makes an interesting prediction. It says that atoms, when cooled to a temperature close to absolute zero (-273.15°C), will collapse into a new state of matter. This is called the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).
Many people thought BEC was just an idea, since it was near impossible to make. The first BEC took seventy years to make after Bose’s paper. In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, of the University of Colorado cooled rubidium atoms to very near absolute zero. Their detector indicated the formation of a BEC, proving Bose & Einstein correct.

Bosons

Particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics are called bosons. These include particles like photons and mesons. You can track a single atom, but never a single photon. In fact a photon can at the same time exist in two places. Two photons can exchange places without moving at all.
When you are making a Bose-Einstein Condensate all the individual atoms disappear. Instead what you get are the subatomic particles, all becoming bosons. So whatever substance you make a BEC out of, all BECs are exactly the same – a collection of bosons.

One kind of boson is the Higgs boson. It is described by physicists in theory, but none has ever seen one yet. So physicists have built a huge special machine called the Large Hadron Collider. It is a circular tunnel 27 km underneath the Swiss mountains, and cost $ 9 billion to build. All to find a tiny particle, predicted by a mistake!

Marie-Anne Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier is often called the greatest chemist ever, for his amazing discoveries. But did you know that his wife was a great chemist too – the secret of his success? As we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry it seems apt that today on her birth anniversary, we know more about her.

Early Times

She was born Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze on 20th January, 1758. When she was thirteen, the Count d’Amerval made a proposal of marriage to her father, Jacques Paulze. The Count d’Amerval was an influential nobleman, but of bad character. He threatened Mr. Paulze with the loss of his job if he refused.
Jacques Paulze instead asked a young man who worked with him if he would marry his daughter instead. This young man, only 28 then, was already famous in France as a geologist and chemist. He was also quite rich and a nobleman himself. The young man, Antoine Lavoisier, accepted. And that’s how Marie Anne became Madame Lavoisier.

Marie Anne and Antoine Lavoisier got a unique wedding gift from Jacques Paulze - a scientific laboratory full of equipments and chemicals!

Chemical Researches

Though being a desperate marriage, Marie Anne shared many interests with her husband. Unlike many women of her time, she was very interested in chemistry. She had a flair for languages which her famous husband did not have. This was very useful, for she was the first to read about scientific advances in Britain in Germany first! She would then translate articles into French or Latin, which Antoine Lavoisier could read.
The Lavoisiers’ experiment on phlogiston is considered among the most beautiful in science. Do you know how it came about?
Madame was translating a book on the subject by Irish scientist Richard Kirwan. She found that he made a lot of errors, which she pointed out at every step. When she gave the translated book to Antoine Lavoisier, it had more of her notes than Kirwan’s writings. And that was how he was convinced that phlogiston was false.
While Lavoisier was quite an academically minded person, Madame was more practical. She used to keep the lab records and ensured that the experiments were carried out according to procedure. Having learned drawing, she would make neat diagrams of the experiments. That made understanding the experiments much easier. It was also a lesson to other scientists on how to do experiments properly.

Later Years

Antoine Lavoisier was quite happy doing experiments, but didn’t bother to share the results with people. Madame Lavoisier on the other hand was very keen. She organised all his results and made him write a proper book. She had it published in 1789. Known as the ‘Elementary Treatise on Chemistry’, it is considered among the best chemistry books ever written.
Sadly, Antoine Lavoisier was executed in 1784 in the French Revolution. His property was seized and his wife was thrown to the mercy of the streets. However, she fought all these difficulties to try and publish the remaining experiments. She finally succeeded, in a book called The Memoirs of Chemistry. By the time she died in 1836, she had restored her husband’s reputation.
It’s because of her that we often say that there is a woman behind every successful man!

Agnes Pockels

As we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry we realise that anyone can discover a great scientific theory. Would you believe us that a woman without a college education, discovered such a theory while washing dishes in the kitchen sink? She was Agnes Pockels!

Surface Tension

Ever blown bubbles from a soap solution? The shape of the bubble is because of a phenomenon called surface tension, which happens where water meets air. The soap in the bubble reduces the surface tension, allowing the water bubble to last for sometime without breaking.

It is very important at the kitchen sink. If you use too little soap, the water will not remove the oil sticking to the dirt. If you use too much, you’ll have to keep buying soap! The right balance was discovered by a German woman – Agnes Pockels.

Letter to Rayleigh

In 1891, the famous British physicist Lord Rayleigh received a letter in German. When he had it translated, he found that it mentioned some astonishing experiments. The writer, Agnes Pockels, had devised a simple device, consisting of a tin trough, with a movable strip of tin on top. She would fill the trough with water contaminated with many kinds of things. By moving the partition back and forth, she could measure the differences in surface tension between water containing different things.

She had told Rayleigh to keep the results for himself. But he was so impressed that he forwarded it to the scientific journal Nature. The journal published the letter in Pockel’s name. She became famous all over the world. Later, she could publish many more papers in different scientific journals in her own name. In those times, it was a rare honour for a woman.

Life & Times

Agnes Pockels was born in Venice on 14th February, 1862. Her family moved to Brunswick in 1871. After she finished school, she stayed at home to take care of her parents. In those days girls were not allowed to study further in college. But Agnes had really wanted to study Physics.

Her younger brother, Friedrich was admitted to the University of Gottingen to study physics. Knowing his sister’s interest, he would often send her news of what was going on in the world of physics. At the same time, she was doing her experiments in the kitchen sink. It was through her brother that she came to know of Lord Rayleigh, who was doing experiments in surface tension.

Agnes Pockels remained a housewife throughout her life, doing experiments in the kitchen. But recognition finally came when she got the Laura Leonard Award in 1931 at the age of 70. The next year she got an honorary PhD from the Technical University of Brunswick. She died in 1935.