"From the human point of view, Bose was the best of them all..."

About a year ago, Professor Kameshwar Wali published a nice article on Bose and Einstein in the Fall 2005 History of Physics Newsletter published by the American Physical Society. Professor Wali reviews of the history of Bose's fundamental contribution and highlights Bose's impact. He also touches upon Bose's relationship with Einstein.

To appreciate Bose’s accomplishment and Einstein’s own realization of its importance and its extension to ordinary matter, one needs to take a look at the struggle over several decades to unravel the true nature of blackbody radiation, that ultimately would lead to one of the two fundamental (Bose-Einstein) statistics based on the New Quantum Mechanics, the other being the Fermi-Dirac Statistics.

Bose and Einstein (html version — scroll down to last article)
Bose and Einstein (full PDF version of History of Physics Newsletter. Bose and Einstein is on page 9)

Professor Wali is Emeritus and Research Professor at the Department of Physics at Syracuse University and Fellow American Physical Society. He is known for his well-received biography of physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar titled Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his work on the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.

As an interesting historical side note, Chandrasekhar knew S.N. Bose during his time in Calcutta. His uncle, C.V. Raman and Bose were at Calcutta University at the same time in the early part of the century. Raman also won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of what is known as the Raman Effect.

In an interview with Chandrasekhar published in Chandra, Chandrasekhar is quoted as saying:

Chandrasekhar: Satyen Bose was one person who, when Raman made the discovery [of the Raman Effect], did not associate himself with the others by belittling it. I think you have noted my recollection of Raman telling me what Bose had said to him after seeing the spectra, "Professor Raman, you have made a great discovery. It will be called the Raman Effect, and you will get the Nobel Prize." Bose in some ways, from the human point of view, was the best of them all. He was very generous, gentle, easygoing, and not particularly caring about the glamorous aspects of science. (p. 250)