Page 26 - CTB-1

26 PIONEERING A NEW FUTURE
Bose Institute
Above: Jagadish Chandra Bose with NC Nag, JC Ghosh, JC Bose, MN Saha, S Dutta; (Front row) NR Sen, JN Mukherjee, SN Bose, DM Bose (1928); JC Bose's research assistants – GP Das, SCDas,BCSenandNSen
More than a century ago, on 30 November 1917, an Indian man, almost single- handedly, established and dedicated
a brand new research institute to the nation on his 59th birthday, he was none other than Jagadish Chandra Bose, a polymath and a pioneer of wireless communication, a legend who made discoveries in plant electrophysiology and other fields, and was the first internationally recognized Indian scientist to come out of colonial India.
Bose Institute was the third such
institute founded in colonial India,
following the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science
in 1876 by Mahendra Lal Sircar and the
Indian Institute of Science in 1909 by the
Imperial government with encouragement
and financial support from Jamshedji Tata and the Maharaja of Mysore. Bose Institute was unique among these in that it was, in the true sense, India’s first research institute.
In the fifty years that Bose Institute has been receiving the support of the Department of Science and Technology its activities have increased and
diversified manifold. In physics, many new and challenging areas have opened up internationally in which Bose Institute was able to play a pioneering, and even seminal, role. In the emerging field
of quantum measurement, computation and foundations of quantum mechanics, scientists from
Bose Institute has been playing a leading role in establishing the field in India. The use of statistical mechanics concepts in
biological systems was initiated in India
through Bose Institute and it is also proud to have initiated the nascent field of Quark-
Gluon Plasma (QGP) on an international scale. For those who do not know, this is the
novel state of matter that putatively populated the early universe microseconds after the Big Bang. The seminal works on the diagnostics of QGP in energetic nuclear collisions and the implications of QGP in astrophysics and cosmology carried out at Bose Institute have also been internationally acclaimed. It is on the strength of this reputation
DREAM FULFILLED | Jagadish Chandra Bose
‘Today I dedicate this institute – not merely a laboratory but a temple – to the nation.’
In 1917, Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had turned 59 years old, was just retiring from Presidency College where he had completed an illustrious and fulfilling career in
science, when he established Bose Institute.
Bose’s research career formally started on 30 November 1894. It was on his 37th
birthday that he had declared he would dedicate his life to original scientific research, a non-trivial endeavour, since he had to steal time from his core teaching duties at
Presidency College and there was absolutely no funding. He focused on Hertzian waves that he used in demonstrations to his students. Within a year, he had published
his first paper, On the Polarisation of the Electric Ray, in the Asiatic Society Journal, followed by the first of a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.