Satyen Bose
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Guest Writer Series
Dr. Ranadhir Mitra, known as Gogol among most Bengalis who know him, was a college student when he became a friend of Satyen Bose and the Bose family. Ranadhir got his MSc. in physics from Calcutta University and became a Post-MSc. Fellow at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP). All his "chats" with Bose took place during those years, except the last one. In these writings, the contexts of conversations, recollections, diversions are quite self-explanatory.
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Satyen Bose: A Luminous Mind and Rays of Delight
Part 2
By Ranadhir Mitra
Jump to Part 1
Over the years, I brought to my writings some thoughts on Satyen Bose. But as soon as I try to talk about him, the vista expands, and with that some thoughts get entangled with others, boundaries get formed and then vanish, and what I had thought would be some simply storytelling, becomes a complex fabric of many shapes and colors. In the end, there is incompleteness and hesitation, and at first that bothered me. Then I thought, all that is good because there will always be more to say.
- Ranadhir Mitra 2024
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Here I am again with bits and pieces of remembrances. People and events scattered like cities and villages, roadways and rivers, connected by a map, not by any clock compelling a single direction of time. That map has remained equally steady under moonlight and under storm clouds. It has also bound together immense vistas where thorn bushes and craters appeared suddenly, without warning.
As a matter of fact, “my truth” about Satyen Bose is yet another cluster of events and people that turned out to be incomplete for me and possibly dissatisfying to some of my readers. On my part, there is some more to add to this truth because I have discovered memories that slipped through cerebral cracks—not repressed as unpalatable, but stories that stumbled off the edge of my pond somehow. So here are the lost pieces now to be put back as little rockpiles by the water. Some of these pieces were embedded in my time with Jethu that I had recalled in the last segment and more of these will surface again. But there are pieces an earlier time when I was still an undergraduate.
But before that, some introductory thoughts. Whenever I have chatted about Jethu with friends and family, several people have recalled their own fond memories of Satyen Bose. Some friends were delighted to remember him through my stories. A few were frustrated that I didn't include this, that or the other. My truth is a tiny window that opened to a receding horizon, soon to disappear. I had no palace gates or crystal ceilings through which I could have studied the Great One and I was too young to have witnessed, and certainly to have figured out, the politics and sorrow of fostering the love of science in India inside a vision of education still unrealized.
One storytelling truth about Jethu was from my young friend Budu (Ahitgani, son of Ruchira and Satyesh, grandson of Pranati and Bishnu Dey) who told me about his childhood memories of the man with silver-white hair.
“I remember all kinds of strange things about him. Like he, my ‘white-haired grandpa’ sitting cross-legged on his bed in his undershirt, leaning forward with his eyes closed—listening to others and talking to them.”
“His high-powered glasses fascinated me. I'd pick them up without even asking and wear them. I found the view through those lenses quite trippy. If my mother complained, he scolded her. In fact, once he told her, if you don’t stop harassing the kid, I'll take you to court!’ He would overrule my parents every time we were in the same space, and he’d allow me to do whatever I wanted. That was wonderful.”
In our world, childhood must have protection from misplaced authority. No debate about that for me.
“Equally fascinating were all those notebooks and sheets with science stuff written in them... in purple ink—and sometimes green,” Budu continued. “I was spellbound by the color of the ink and would stare at the writing. Obviously, I had no idea about the content of those pages. And in school, we all used blue ink to write. But later, in higher grades, I switched to writing in purple ink—and sometimes green! And I remember the silver haired man surrounded by a bunch of cats who hovered around those books and papers, and he would let me fondle them. All this time I had no idea whom I was dealing with. He was simply my ‘white-haired grandpa’.”
Yes, as I wrote in the first segment: an astounding intellect combined with unmatched affection. And many of us will remember using those notebooks—several of the “Skolar” brand, squarish with deep purple covers.
From Bangalore to Berlin: Serious and Silly Encounters
A few years ago, I spoke to a group of science undergraduates (most of them budding physicists) at Bangalore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium. I had been invited by my friend Vishu. (Vishu—C.V. Vishveshwara, the first director of the Planetarium and S. Chandrasekhar’s student, is no longer with us, but we’ll always remember him as “the black holey man”.)
I was to remind those young men and women that the enchantment of their vocation and the passion to pursue it were, more often than not, accompanied by much hardship and sacrifice. Certainly, for everyone I could I encountered or knew well.
This was equally true of the plight of poets and musicians, I had added. By way of examples I retold anecdotes about a young Marie Curie in Paris and her difficult start as recounted by Satyen Bose in his essays. Also, about Jethu’s recollections of his dear friend and colleague Meghnad Saha, the country boy with whom he translated into English Einstein special and general (1905 and 1915) relativity papers—from German. One time, Jethu had mentioned that Meghnad had to travel all over Kolkata tutoring students to make enough money to support himself and his family too. (This wasn’t uncommon in my student life either. During my student days in Kolkata, like several friends of mine, I had to tutor young students to support myself.)
I added other stories about the dedication on part of struggling poets and writers, artists and musicians I witnessed in Kolkata—in California too. Then I decided I’d get more exotic with an icebreaker—with a touch of humor I thought. Those students, several of them staring into fancy mobile phones, may then feel a bit of what I had felt once in my own “space odyssey”.
I told them that the day I stood across the street from Einstein’s house in Princeton—a modest dwelling to be sure—tears rolled down my cheeks. Cars were going past the building at a steady pace, and pedestrians were crossing in front of the house, but not a single person stopped to look at the façade of 112 Mercer Street. Not even a glance of curiosity. And there was no signature of any kind to tell them who may have lived there once. Although the house was designated to be a historical site.
(Princeton is a pretentious town, and the city governors at that time wouldn’t allow even a plaque on Einstein’s house let alone a statue acknowledging Time magazine’s “man of the century”. To them, many famous people had lived in Princeton, not just Albert Einstein. Just too many for public recognition. Really?)
It had struck me that the house number 1,1,2 were the first 3 digits of the Fibonacci series and their sum was 4. And 4 was the sum of Satyen Bose's address number in Kolkata: 22 Ishwar Mill Lane. I paused, realizing that such coincidences, presented however wittily, or nonsensically, made no impression on the young minds of Bangalore. I even tried to bring the great Ramanujan into the conversation. Before he suffered much distress in his life in England, well before the hardship in his daily life began, that genius had noticed the magic number 1729 of a taxi, I believe on his first day in England. On the way to meet his mentor Godfrey Hardy. No one from the student group showed any curiosity about the riddle of 1729 and I gave up trying to make interesting the plight of scientists.
We went on to address the idea of “doing science”. Was that like “doing lunch” daily, or “doing puja” weekly, or merely calculating all the time? Then on to the students’ own vision of a future in research, or perhaps in teaching as well. In any event, I ended up not talking about SNB’s life in Berlin, his first meeting with Einstein and such, the way I remembered from the stories at number 22!
What I had intended to recall, but gave up because of the blank stares from those students, would have followed the pattern of my “Jethu stories” from Part One—where I described how he recalled Madame Curie and life in Paris. Before the story of his first meeting with Einstein, I had planned to read from a speech by SNB in Bengali given at an event celebrating his seventieth birthday and translated in “SN Bose: The Man and His Work, Part II”.
The excerpt went like this: “[Those]… who have assembled here with a lot of zest for science, I would like to tell you this: do not take up science for the sake of passing examinations. Just as on the one hand, one needs to study literature to appreciate one's own country and its problems, to look for the causes of misery of one's own countrymen and to be acquainted with what men are doing for one another in other countries, so, on the other hand, does one need to study science. It enables one to have an idea of what can be done to get rid of man's miseries. Your interest in science should be rooted in this quest.”
Satyen Bose traveled from Paris to Berlin in October of 1925, and had his first meeting with Einstein sometime in November. Winter was already enveloping Central Europe, and Jethu had found a loft in Berlin which he shared with another young man from Bengal. Jethu said “His name was Aurobindo Ghose (not the Aurobindo) and he was a student in Berlin.” This loft (between first and second floor) had no heating of its own and the two roomies spent all day and all evening at the university—as long as they could—in the warmth of the library or some café.
“Our landlady had a huge stone fireplace downstairs where she used to heat whole bunch of bricks for us to use. We’d return home more or less at bedtime, gather all those bricks and take them upstairs. Then we’d make a perimeter with the bricks on our beds—along the edges, slide into the middle, put blankets over us, and try to go to sleep… And chat some too, about everything under the sun. That was our daily routine… most days.”
“Where would you eat then?” I asked.
“Most of the time around the university… There were many cheap places. But we did have the use of our landlady’s kitchen and we’d cook sometimes. Simple stuff and not with spices. We had natural refrigeration too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there was one outside window in the loft, and it was double-paned. So, we got mostly meat and sometimes veggies too. We’d carefully pack these things between the two window panes and leave them there until we were ready to cook. Pretty ingenious, huh?” Jethu was always very jovial with his fond memories, like the Bach concert aftermath I related last time.
I’m not sure about the sequence of events, but I know Jethu went to see Einstein for the first time during his “loft days.” He must have told me about that encounter when I was a post-graduate student and I can recall well what he said.
“So, on the morning of my appointment I ring the doorbell to Einstein’s place, 5 Heberland Strasse, little shaky—with a palpitating heart of course. A woman opened the door with a welcoming smile. She said, ‘Ah, you must be Bose, come in… come in and have a seat. I am Frau Einstein. He’s expecting you.’ She led me to a chair and took my hat and coat. I realized this was his second wife—cousin Elsa. And I thanked her as I sat down.”
“She was dressed to go out, but sat a few minutes with me. Tried to make me feel at home with motherly advice about shops and foods I may want to find. Then she left, with a smile and a pat on my head. I looked toward the sitting room then. I could see a sliver of the room through a French door. A number of men were inside. Some were sitting down. A couple of them were pacing. One may have been the great man himself, but one I recognized as Kramer—a mathematician I had met in Paris. My heart was beating quite fast.”
“Then you went in?”
“No. Soon Kramer and others started filing out—one by one it seemed. They all looked at me—with a smile or a nod, but didn’t say anything. It was as though I’d be called in next for an oral exam. Then he came out to the foyer and shook my hand. He said, ‘Come on in. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ And I followed him into the sitting room.”
“Then what happened?”
“He asked me whether I was okay in Berlin and a few little things like that—but rather formally I thought. I was looking around the room as we talked and noticed that on one of the shelves there was a violin. Soon we started talking shop as they say, and that was that.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, Einstein noticed I had looked at the violin a couple of times. At some point, he did say that he played the thing now and then. Then he asked, ‘How about you, do you play any musical instrument?’ I explained how I liked to play the esraj and how the instrument was played.
“You know, people ask me all the time if Einstein played the violin for me—or in my presence. No, he never did. But it was always on display.”
Satyen Bose’s relation to Albert Einstein was complicated, and many have commented on this. Many details have been compiled in the volume on his life, lectures and essays. Jethu’s own respect of his guru is evident in the address “Dear Master” for example, and in the two essays, Einstein I and II, written in Bengali originally. We know the two of them talked and corresponded about a whole range of things lasting 30 years. I can only say that there was an element of frustration sometimes when Jethu talked about their collaboration, or perhaps I just imagined it. He never uttered a single word of dissatisfaction about his guru—on any front—in my presence, and yes he did refer to Einstein as his “Guru”. Jethu seemed both excited and disappointed when he told me the story (again, several years later) of how the final opportunity of meeting up with Einstein vanished. The events are rather well-known, but worth repeating one more time.
Many of us can remember well that in the heyday of cold war paranoia, the US and USSR were conceived as mortal enemies by people of all shades of politics. The advent of non-aligned nations like India and Indonesia did not make the US conciliatory toward post-colonial nationhood. During the Eisenhower presidency, anyone who was not in the US camp was by default pro-Soviet. The cold war was hot, and the specter nuclear weapons across the globe had become quite real.
In 1953, SNB had gone to Budapest—to the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace. After that he visited Denmark and Switzerland (meeting Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli), and also Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union (meeting Lev Landau, I believe). Later in the year Einstein wrote to SNB commenting on his paper on a unified field theory, and somewhere along the line (I don’t remember the sequence) Jethu was invited by Einstein to come to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. And that’s when Cold War politics kicked in.
The US State Department denied SNB a visa, because he had traveled to the “Eastern Block” fairly recently, and Einstein had too much classified information in his head. The visa denial was appealed as I understood later, but to no avail. I also understood that the two of them (AE and SNB) would be meeting under natural circumstances in Switzerland—at the Bern conference in the summer of 1955, celebrating 50 years of the special relativity theory. But as the world knows, Einstein died in the spring of 1955 and there was no second Bose-Einstein collaboration. In this instance in a politically harmless but intellectually enriching context between two people who were old friends and who belonged to nations that were not “nuclear enemies”. SNB did go to Bern that summer, but there was no Einstein to find.
As I was finishing Part One of this series on “my truth” about Satyen Bose, I realized that I need to add a couple of stories from our encounters in an earlier period when I was a mere undergraduate, and took place not in his house on Ishwar Mill Lane, not even in Kolkata, as it turned out. Perhaps that is why I had banished these memories to a distant landscape, but now they have come hopping onto our map.
Sputnik: Like a Diamond in the Sky!
This is one meeting with Jethu happened on an unforgettable morning—speaking “world historically”—in the city of Allahabad. This was the morning after the world learned that the Soviet Union had launched their Sputnik, the first “man made” satellite orbiting the earth, promising our species unending cosmic adventures.
My parents lived in Allahabad then. My father, the poet Arun Mitra was professor of French Language and Literature in the 1950s. Their neighbors were Kedareshwar Banerjee and his family. Prof. Banerjee was the physics department head at Allahabad University and had been SNB’s younger colleague at Dhaka University once. It so happened that on October 4, 1957, Jethu was staying with the Banerjees because he was being awarded an honorary doctorate by the university. It so happened too that on that day I was home with my parents from Kolkata (where I was an undergrad) because it was Durgapuja vacation time. My parents’ flat happened to be right behind the Banerjee duplex, across a lane, and my mother Shanti the writer had invited Jethu to come for breakfast with us next morning.
October 5 started as a cool autumn day in Allahabad and the alley between the two homes was flooded by sunlight. I remember Jethu and I walked arm in arm the fifty odd steps from the Banerjee house to my parents’ diminutive apartment. My parents had come out to the front porch to greet us, and Ma asked immediately what Jethu would like to eat. Ma was a superior cook and Jethu did enjoy good food.
“You know what they say: my house is your house is my house! So, whatever you give me I’ll enjoy…” He always had that endearing smile for people who deserved it. Always.
“So, what do you think of today’s news?” My father asked as we all sat down. He couldn’t wait any longer. If anyone had an insightful measure of the space exploration business in that cold war era, it would have to be Satyen Bose.
Of course, Baba knew about the U.S. government denying Jethu a visa to meet with Einstein in Princeton, and in any event, there was no particular respect for U.S. policy among people we knew. (I remember too how our political knowledge merged in a strange way back then. I have mentioned that Einstein died in the spring of 1955—April 18 to be exact and there was no second Bose-Einstein collaboration. Sometime later I discovered that April 18 was also the first day of the Bandung conference of the non-aligned nations of Asia and Africa. A strange footnote to the cold war.)
Jethu closed his eyes and thought for a moment. Quite usual for him.
“You know, Arun, I’m not sure what thy are doing. Now they have flung this thing into the sky… What is it really? Not a boy… Not a girl… then what?” (Actually, his in Bengali, the question was posed quite indelicately and I’d rather not recite the words here.)
“Indeed, all technology can be used to destroy humanity as we know it. And there’s always money to be made. But I look at it differently. Channeling immense resources for this kind of a technological triumph at the cost of basic education bothers me. Getting young people excited about their world… how it works, what we know, what remains a mystery… Much can be learned… should be learned without sophisticated technological application of science and mathematics… and with a feel for the arts too.”
This was quintessential SNB. As a champion of experimental physics (see my first part on Jethu, and also his essays in Bengali, history of the Khaira lab, etc.) he was quite wary of the political implications of scientific discoveries and technological inventions. He had visited the laboratory of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner when he was living in Berlin. The subsequent successful nuclear fission experiments by those two in a laboratory environment eventually lead to nuclear reactors and weapons, two of these used by the US in Japan. Humanists of his generation (and my parents’ generation as well) had lived through WW II, and its ignominious end in the new horror of Hiroshima-Nagasaki in 1945.
On that day after Sputnik, everyone in the room was acutely aware that there was no “neutrality” to scientific discoveries and technological innovations. Politics, not ethics ruled the ultimate course of knowledge in contemporary societies, especially when it comes to warring and antagonistic nation states. (One other person in the room was my sister Uma—then in high school.)
I don’t recall the turn the discussion took after that, principally between Jethu and my father, but the arms race was a major part of it. The emergence of a “Space Force” in addition to army, navy and airforce is a fact for many nations now. I’m sure the two of them would be horrified to hear the proud declaration of a space force for France—that country which both Satyen Bose and Arun Mitra used to love so much.
In retrospect and in that morning’s context, I think it is relevant to note this excerpt from Werner Heisenberg on the anxiety in the scientific community as it must have realized that once again “new problems” had come to life after Sputnik. Referring to the conditions of pursuing science after World War II, Heisenberg wrote in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations that “the invention of nuclear weapons has also raised entirely new problems for science and scientists. The political influence of science has become very much stronger than it was before World War II, and this fact has burdened the scientist, especially the atomic physicist, with a double responsibility.” If he participates in politics in connection with science and military strategy, “then he will eventually have to face the responsibility for decisions of enormous weight…”
On the other hand, if he withdraws from the world of politics, he’ll be unable to prevent wrong policy decisions of the state. Scientists must inform their governments about the awesome power of weapons of mass destruction, but Heisenberg doesn’t see the usefulness of peace conference and such with scientists. Resolutions about world peace “without stating precisely the conditions of this peace” will inevitably be partisan. “Any honest declaration for peace must be an enumeration of the sacrifices one is prepared to make for its preservation. But as rule the scientists have no authority to make statements of this kind.” (My emphasis)
Look at this assertion alongside Satyen Bose’s seventieth birthday speech I quoted earlier and his journey to Budapest, for example—to the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace.
(I have elaborated on this issue in an essay/lecture titled, “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty: Physics, Ethics, and Politics”. Here, I want to add my interaction with another scientists of note, Freeman Dyson. Many think he was cheated out of a Nobel Prize when Tomonaga, Feynman and Schwinger got theirs. Satyen Bose wrote a piece on Tomonaga’s difficult path to success in this context and I’ll get back to that in Part Three.)
Well, coincidentally again, I was in Prof. Dyson’s course on quantum electrodynamics when he was a visiting faculty member on my campus (UCSD) and we chatted at times then, and again later when he was in Princeton, at the Institute of Advanced Studies.
In a public lecture given at UCSD, Dyson had addressed the impetus of a technological rationality in building machines that are bigger and better and more powerful. Dyson argued that there was no necessary connection between intelligence and technology around the theme of “extraterrestrial intelligence”. Or, any kind of intelligence for that matter—as exemplified by the rapid destruction of eucalyptus trees on our campus to make room for new buildings and unthinking policies of deforestation.
Dyson too had been a student of Godfry Hardy, Ramanujan’s mentor as I indicated earlier. In his book The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, Dyson says whenever he designed any machine, he thought of Hardy’s “statement that expressed in a few bitter [sic] words, his hatred of applied science: ‘A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly the destruction of human life.’ I was trying to prove Hardy wrong, trying to prove that science can be useful without being harmful.” In his speech to which I have referred, Dyson also asserted that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings may not want to communicate with anyone else. Perhaps they don’t want to use or even to develop technology that would be required for the purpose.
All right then, let’s put the Dyson view and Heisenberg’s conclusion side by side with Satyen Bose’s exhortation to the young once more: “do not take up science for the sake of passing examinations. Just as … one needs to study literature… to look for the causes of misery of one's own countrymen and to be acquainted with what men are doing for one another in other countries, so… (too) does one need to study science. It enables one to have an idea of what can be done to get rid of man's miseries. Your interest in science should be rooted in this quest.” Let us throw into the hat two other observations. One from The Master, Einstein himself: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” The other from Hans Bethe, Nobelist who active in America’s Manhattan Project, as he summed up the possibilities in his own scientific work toward the end of his life: “Just because you can do something, does not mean you have to do it.”
So, do we look for consistencies and contradictions here, or do we say—minimally, that while it is true physics cannot criticize physical nature, it is also true that nature gives no imperative to physicists to build weapons of mass destruction?
So, don’t physicists have even a greater responsibility to human beings—even though we are mere specks in the universe to be sure—than to that universe as a whole?
What would Satyen Bose say today? He certainly would have been up on experimental work of various kinds but still skeptical of the need to throw humans into space. It would be valuable to recall what else SNB may have observed about space exploration, satellites for science and such between 1957 and his sudden death in 1974. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an opportunity to talk to him for seven odd years between 1963 and 1970, so I know directly only that he was no doubt aware of discoveries about space-time that could shed light on the makings of a unified field theory. He wasn’t thrilled at all about sending humans into space because that kind of money would be better used on earth including the betterment of experimental science. That much I know. And no doubt he, like his Guru, would cringe at the idea of a “space force”, now a reality. How would they respond to yet “another first” after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another step toward the extinction of our species?
Afterwords
Every now and then when I watch scientists “talking to the masses” on You Tube, I think about Satyen Bose’s various essays connecting science and human beings. I wonder what he would have to say about observations going all the way to “the edge” of the universe. Specially all the post-Hubble, post-Webb discoveries out there and results (the Higgs Boson) from gargantuan particle accelerators down here. And about the “Standard Model” today of elementary particles, built from the mid-seventies, as experimental physics advanced in leaps and bounds.
Of course, it is quite silly to imagine what any pioneer of modern science who is no longer with us could say about “here-now” (as old Hegel might ask). But as I was looking at the chart of particles recently—at the three generations of matter particles (fermions) on one side, and the force/interaction particles (bosons) on the other, with that scalar “Heavy Higgs” in the corner, I remembered Jethu’s observation again, “You know, that photon, it’s a very tricky beast!” Beasts with a “spin”, an attribute which I believe SNB was the first to imagine and to consider. Beasts, some of whom are seen to vanish in the belly of a real black hole. So, I suppose I have a right to wonder.
A few footnotes are in order as well.
When I saw Jethu in 1970 (conversations in Part One) the subject of space exploration and the reasons for sending humans out there or not, didn’t come up as a subject of importance because to a large extent our thoughts hovered around “catching up” on many fronts. I did form an agenda for my 1974 trip, including many questions for him. Of course, that meeting didn’t happen.
Around the time when American astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969, SNB’s son Ramen was in California and we saw him regularly. I don’t recall our talking about the space program, and I don’t we believe we asked ourselves or intended to call Jethu to find out what he thought about the moon landing. (Remember Sputnik Day) Those were times framed very much by the politics of war, and perhaps our minds were on other aspects of the human condition.
I just watched a “studentcam” prize-winning documentary made by a group of middle-school students from Maryland, USA, titled “War in Orbit: The Fight for the Final Frontier.” A take on the “Star Trek” series to be sure, but the specific observation and critique concerns the totality of orbiting objects—active satellites plus space debris. It was amazing to discover how much danger these pose to life on earth. From a single one on October 4, 1957 to thousands upon thousands today.
This student work is a reminder of both our self-destructive journey and also the concern and hope in the hearts and minds of our youth. I’d urge everyone to watch the presentation within the frame of reference I’ve invoked here.
Another request in the same context. If anyone knows more about SNB’s thinking on satellite use, space exploration, more generally about science, technology and the human condition, beyond what’s readily available regarding Satyen Bose’s life and work, please send us your thoughts. It’ll be our privilege to make this forum richer. Till next time then.
Copyright, Ranadhir Mitra, 2024
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