by Somdeep Datta 12 July 2022
The most wronged scientist in history? Oh, I have two nominations here.
At first, I was going to answer Satyandranath Bose.
The man behind the fifth state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate.
The man behind the Higgs-Boson particle also called “God Particle”.
The man behind Bose-Einstein statistics which laid the field for quantum statistics.
And yet the man without a much deserved Nobel Prize in Physics.
Satyendranath Bose (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974)
The irony. Although seven Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to S N Bose’s concepts of the boson, Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensate, Bose himself was not awarded a Nobel Prize.
But another Bose may just have the claim here.
A biologist. A botanist. A physicist. And one of the earliest writers of Science Fiction.
He invented the Crescograph which measured response of plants to stimuli, scientifically proving that parallelism between plant and animal tissues. In simpler language, he was the first to demonstrate that plants have life, like any other life form.
Currently, you may be reading this on your smartphone via the internet through EDGE/HSPA or WiFi. All of which uses radio waves for communication. Guess who was the first to figure out the potential for wireless communications via radio waves?
Bose was the first to use a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves, and he invented various microwave components, which are present in almost every technology that we use in our daily lives yet scarcely noticed.
5G is the talk of the town now. A critical component of which is the millimeter wave. Guess who is credited with discovering millimeter length electromagnetic waves and that too even a century ago?
A man who was reluctant to patent anything to his name. A man who valued availability of science and knowledge over monetizing it.
And the man with phenomenal contribution across multliple disciplines is none other than Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose.
There could have not been scientists more wronged in history, so much deserving yet snubbed by the Nobel Prize.
Posted in Quora 12 July 2022
