Birth of the Boson Performance and Panel Discussion

​Panelists: Hasan Padamsee and Falguni Sarkar
Moderators: Gautam and Jayanti Bandyopadhyay

​Hasan Padamsee is a retired professor of Physics from Cornell University with awards in the field of Particle Accelerators.  He obtained his Ph.D. from Northeastern U., Boston.  He has been a playwright and musical librettist for 15 years. Besides Bengal to Berlin – Birth of the Boson, his plays are Creation’s Birthday, Quantum Lovers, and the Ultimate Quest.  His musicals are Einstein’s Love Story, Alice in Quantum Wonderland, and Hubble.  His works have been produced at Entertaining Science in Greenwich Village,  NY, the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago, the Chicago Amateur Astronomy Convention, and his musical about Einstein at the City Lit Theatre in Chicago.  [email protected]

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Falguni Sarkar flanked by Professors Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman taken during Falguni’s visit to the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2007. Professors Cornell, Weiman, and Wolfgang Ketterle from MIT (not pictured) were awarded the Nobel Price in Physics 2001 “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute cases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.”

Falguni Sarkar is one of the grandchildren of the famed Bengali mathematician and scientist Satyendra Nath Bose known for Bose Einstein Statistics, the fundamental particle boson, and the Bose Einstein Condensate. His mother is Bose’s youngest daughter.
Having been born and raised outside of India Falguni knew little about the contributions his famous grandfather until a July morning in 1995 when he awakened to see the front page of the New York Times proclaim that a prediction made by Albert Einstein based on Bose's work had been proven true, that particles following Bose Statistics (later called bosons coined by P.A.M. Dirac) when cooled to a low enough temperature (near absolute zero) transform into a new form of matter later called a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The discovery was heralded as the Holy Grail of Physics, and would revolutionize fields such as superconductivity, quantum computing, and lasers; helping to unlock the secrets of the quantum world!
But beyond Bose the scientist, Falguni became fascinated by Bose the man. His research has taken him across the world, speaking to dozens of people who knew Bose intimately, not just as a scientist, but also as a father, uncle, friend, guru, and of course mastermoshai. Bose was a polymath, whose thirst for knowledge may have been surpassed only by his passion for teaching, especially in the mother tongue. Bose the man had an immense impact on the lives of many everyday people, through his love of literature, music, and of course the Bangali penchant for endless hours of adda.
Falguni shares his research as the publisher of the SN Bose Project, providing a platform for writers, filmmakers, journalists, and artists to share their stories about Professor Bose and his legacy. Falguni invites visitors, and welcomes comments on the articles, blogs, and stories at www.snbose.org.

Jayanti Bandyopadhyay is a Professor Emeritus of Accounting at the Bertolon School of Business at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.  She is a co-founder, treasurer and actress for Stage Ensemble Theatre Unit.  Jayanti has a bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Viriginia Commonwealth University and an MBA and a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo.  Her passion is the performing arts.  She has produced a feature-length Bengali movie released in Kolkata, India in 2000.  ​

Gautam Bandyopadhyay is a retired technology and innovation management professional with more than 45 years’ experience in National Lab and multinational corporations. His early education was in Presidency college, Calcutta and University of Calcutta, followed by graduate studies (M.S. and Ph.D.) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.  Current hobbies include paying forward through teaching, guiding and mentoring industrial, non-profit and university student project teams in miscellaneous disciplines as well as writing on his life experiences.

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Information about the play Bose to Bosons is available on the SETU website!

www.setu.uswww.setu.us/