Creating a Peripheral Trading Zone: Satyendra Nath Bose and Bose–Einstein Statistics, Doing Science in the Role of an Outsider

Abstract

The term ‘boson’ appears in almost all discussions on elementary particles and carries a reference to the name of Satyendra Nath Bose, the co-founder of quantum statistics. Yet, in spite of this wide use of a term coined after his name, Bose himself remains a shadowy figure in the history of science. This article is an attempt to reconstruct how Bose arrived at the statistics for which he is now remembered, and his subsequent two-year brief role in international science. Through the lens of Bose's practice, I seek to grasp the contexts of those peripheral scientists who enter the practice of science from outside of the main group, and yet somehow manage to create a lasting contribution within it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous referees of this journal who read an earlier version of this paper and posed several questions about how a peripheral scientist contributes in the work of a main metropolitan community. An early version of this paper was read at the 39th Philosophy of Science Conference, Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 2012, and I thank James W. McAllister for his questions about trading zones in peripheral contexts. I would also like to thank Alexander Levine, my colleague at the University of South Florida, for his encouragement and his discussions on the topic of peripheral science, and Rajinder Singh for information about Calcutta University syllabi during Bose's time.

Notes

The question of the knowledge flow in science, and the diverse directions of this flow between a centre and its peripheries, has received important contributions from the historians of science (e.g. see Raj 2007). However, this is quite a different question from asking how a peripheral scientist creates a contribution to science.

Kitcher's epistemologically sullied science describes of course mainstream practitioners who are driven by various non-epistemic goals, such as priority motives, etc. But this model can easily be extended to the contexts of a peripheral practice.

In Galison (1997), a trading zone consists of two nearly equal groups of experts who happen to come from very different domains. Collins, Evans, and Gorman (2010) extend this idea to include exchanges between groups that are unequal, e.g. an interaction between a set of government scientists and some AIDS activists. A trading zone can thus connect agents who do not all stand, epistemically, on the same level. And yet, at the end of such a cycle of exchange, the newcomers are inducted as a (new) set of experts, thereby expanding the original scientific community.

This syllabus, which today would be called Applied Mathematics, consisted of astronomy, dynamics, hydrodynamics, and a few other mathematical topics. The corresponding Physics syllabus of Calcutta University at that time consisted of Mechanics, Acoustics, Optics, Heat and Electricity (courtesy: Rajinder Singh, pers. commun.).

In 1914, as part of this effort, Bose and Saha translated Einstein's papers on general relativity into English, and generally, they kept their eyes fixed on the research programs pursued by Einstein.

As we shall shortly see, this became his main bone of contention with Bose.

Bergia (2009) names a number of other physicists, such as Natanson, Wolfke, and others, who also tried to derive the same law, sometimes closely anticipating Bose. But since Bose's own papers refer only to Planck, Debye, Einstein, Ehrenfest, and Pauli, I shall confine myself to their efforts. It is not clear how much Bose was aware of the others from his colonial isolation.

‘Never accept an idea as long as you are yourself not satisfied with its consistency and the logical structure upon which the concepts are based. Study the masters … lesser authorities cleverly bypass the difficult points’ (Mehra 1982, 564).

‘As a teacher who had to make these things clear to his students, I was aware of the conflicts involved and had thought about them’ (Mehra 1982, 565).

I have chosen to follow Ghosh and Venkataraman in reconstructing Bose's 1924a proof in four logical steps. This is a further elaboration of Stachel's very similar analysis of Bose's proof into a first and a second factor (Stachel 1992). However, since each of these two factors could be analysed into two more steps, the two analyses are quite compatible.

The exchange between Bose and Einstein could be reconstructed by the following timeline: 4 June 1924, Bose sends Einstein his first paper from Dacca; 15 June 1924, Bose sends Einstein his second paper from Dacca; 2 July 1924, Einstein writes to Bose in Dacca; 26 October 1924, Bose informs Einstein of his arrival in Paris; 3 November 1924, Einstein writes to Bose in Paris, criticizing his second paper; 27 January 1925, Bose writes to Einstein about his third paper (sent under a separate cover); 8 October 1925, Bose informs Einstein of his arrival in Berlin; August 1926, Bose returns to India, having lost the controversy with Einstein.

‘The few sentences which Einstein crossed out about the angular momentum of the light quanta is evidence of this’ (Ramaseshan 2000).

Planck represents this as a case of N gas molecules being distributed among the elementary phase space regions of 0, 1, 2, and so on (Mehra 1982, 567).

Much later in life, in a conversation with Mehra 1982, Bose thus recalled his introduction to the black-body problem: ‘I had studied Planck's derivation of his radiation formula and also his Theorie der Wärmestrahlung. I knew about phase space and Boltzmann statistics from Gibb's book. Also I had Boltzmann's Vorlesungen über Gastheorie from Brühl. I knew about Einstein's derivation of Planck's formula and how he had never been satisfied with the derivation of this quantum law; he always kept on coming back to it. Planck's condition ran counter to the classical ideas. Planck was also aware of the difficulties, but he had never been able to resolve them. He had relations which were derived from Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and others in which discontinuities appeared. He wanted to reconcile his theory with classical theory’ (Mehra 1982, 564–565).

‘But because of my attitude people think I did not understand what I was saying. The few sentences which Einstein crossed out about the angular momentum of light quanta is evidence of this’ (Ramasheshan 2000, 637; this conversation took place in 1950).

Interestingly, in his 1971 Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture, Dirac describes a very similar process when he mentions how in 1926 he was able to develop Heisenberg's idea of non-commutation, simply because he was quite unmoved by Heisenberg's fears (about non-commutation).

Bose, however, always remained of the opinion that his second paper was an advance over his first.

This application was accepted provisionally on 2 March 1924, although Bose's employers did not act on his application at all until Einstein's postcard arrived on the scene.

‘I was really not in science any more. I was like a comet, a comet which came once, and never returned again’ (Mehra 1982, 571).

Such unequal relationships can of course exist within as well as outside a scientific metropolis.