Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist

By Sudipto Das

Sir J.C. Bose has been resurrected in many fields recently, more than five decades after his death. In the late 1990s, Bose was acknowledged as one of the inventors of the radio, alongside Marconi. We now know Bose held the first patent for a semiconductor device and he was the first to have used millimetre waves for radio communication, presently used in 5G technology. In plant neurobiology, scientists realized that Bose had claimed plants can feel pain, like animals and humans do, in the early 20th century.

Bose lived during a turbulent phase in India’s history. Closely connected to Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and two extraordinary European women, Bose’s life is a labyrinth of remarkable relationships unexplainable in conventional terms.Both favoured and disfavoured by the English, loved and hated by his acquaintances, mythified and forgotten by his countrymen, Bose was a contronym. This book is an attempt at demystifying the ‘Boseian’ myth.

About the Author: An author, musician, columnist, and a speaker at TED events, Sudipto Das is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. A violinist, trained in Western classical music, he debuted as a music composer in 2014. History, culture, language, and travelling are of special interest to him. Member of an amateur music band, Kohal, Sudipto lives in Bangalore with his family. He is the author of The Ekkos Clan, The Aryabhata Clan and co-author of The Broken Amoretti.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9789389136999

Book preview

Foreword

In 1917, an Indian man almost singlehandedly established and dedicated a brand-new scientific research institute to the Nation on his 60th birthday:

I dedicate today this Institute—not merely a laboratory but a temple—to the Nation.

Bose Institute, as it was called, was the third such institute in colonial India, following the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876 and the Indian Institute of Science in 1909. The man who established this ‘Temple of Science,’ one of the first in Asia dedicated solely to multi-disciplinary scientific research, was none other than the polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose, an eclectic pioneer in wireless communication and plant electrophysiology. He was also the first internationally recognised Indian scientist from colonial India.

With support for research being minimal and discrimination against Indians by the colonial authorities running rampant, Bose’s experience back home at Presidency College in Calcutta had been quite bitter. The demeaning experience in his own country probably sowed the seed for Bose’s aspiration to establish an institute later. He said, ‘… I shall make the path of those who are to follow me less arduous, and that India is never to relinquish what has been won for her after years of struggle.’

Support came from many quarters: Sister Nivedita, a disciple of Vivekananda, was not only a constant inspiration for Bose’s research work, but her strong zeal to finally see an independent India constantly fuelled the ‘idea’ of the Bose Institute, though she never saw its birth.

The Vajra, Bose Institute’s logo, was designed by Sister Nivedita. Other motifs from Bodh Gaya, Sanchi, Ajanta, and Ellora adorning Bose Institute today also reflect Nivedita’s strong nationalistic view of reviving ancient Indian motifs and art forms. Bose received substantial funding from Sara Chapman Bull, another disciple of Vivekananda, like Sister Nivedita. With this, the land for the Institute was purchased at Sister Nivedita’s insistence.

Although Bose bequeathed all his property to Bose Institute, it was not enough. For setting up the Institute, he needed more money, which had to be sourced from various benefactors, including the Maharaja of Patiala Mulraj Khatau, the Maharaja of Kashimbazar, the Maharaja of Baroda S Bomanji, and many other donors from all over India. Bose also raised money by delivering lectures. Support came from Mahatma Gandhi, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Rabindranath Tagore, with whom Bose cherished a lifelong friendship based on mutual admiration. Therefore, in a way, although Bose established the Bose Institute, he was not alone—he was merely representing others as a means of fulfilling a national aspiration.

***

Bose’s extensive studies of the ‘coherer,’ essentially a device that acts as a detector of radio waves, led to his discovery of the common nature of the electric response to all forms of stimulation in animal and plant tissues as well as in some inorganic models. His work bridged the gap between those of inorganic matter and the living; carving out, for the first time, a biophysical view of life and interdisciplinary science that is now in vogue. The problem he faced while treading a distinctly different field of science is best described in his letter to Patrick Geddes on 24 January 1917: ‘I do not belong to any special fold—the physicists think that I have given up physics and gone over to the Botanists; the vegetists think that I am the physiologist and so on …’

Bose quantitatively measured the effect of external stimuli on plant growth at 100,000 times magnification, speed of electrical conduction in plants, ascent of sap, and photosynthesis. In the Preface to his book, The Physiology of Photosynthesis (1924), he wrote, ‘It would appear, therefore, that almost everything that can be known about photosynthesis has now been ascertained. It may be admitted that this is approximately true in qualitative sense, but certainly not in the quantitative sense. The present volume is essentially a record of quantitative research in the various directions.’ His italicisation of the words ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ aptly summarises his approach to Biology: probing Biology, which had essentially been a qualitative science in the early 20th Century, from the quantitative vantage point of a physicist.

Much of Bose’s work yielded out-of-box concepts way beyond his time. The renowned physicist D.M. Bose, the nephew who took charge of Bose Institute after Bose’s demise, wrote, ‘At the turning points in the progress of science, sometimes it is more important to state problems and furnish tools for the investigations, than in giving the correct answer. After all, in science, there is no finality in the solution proposed for any problem.’

Professor Tony Trewavas, University of Edinburgh, an international authority on plant behaviour, wrote (personal communication), ‘Bose made three remarkable points relevant to plant memory and learning. Firstly, he mentioned the reticulation of phloem, drawing parallels between plants and animals. Secondly, he described plant nerves as a network and a system, each of whose parts is affected by every other influence, thus demonstrating a crucial foresight concerning the definition of a network. Thirdly, he pointed out that plants constitute a single organised whole through its system of nerves, quite revolutionary for the time. Totally ahead of his time, Bose provided remarkable insights.’

***

Bose’s fascination was always with nature at large, not a narrow and specialised branch of science. The title of Sudipto Das’s biography on Bose, The Reluctant Physicist, underscores this point poignantly. In fact, the biography starts with a hunting trip to the Himalayan foothills. In writing the story, Das rightly recognises that without a historical context, it is futile to understand the man, both his scientific journey and his personal life. Throughout the book, Das weaves a historical tapestry and gently allows Bose to tread upon it. Bose takes turns and twirls, guided by the contours of the fabric and sometimes even altering the folds and contours through his actions.

Das’s unique style makes the biography stand out, getting right under the skin and presenting Bose like a character in a play to bring out the man in flesh and blood. Of the more than 20 major characters in the play, 18 are from the West, and a majority of them are from the scientific world. This isn’t surprising because as the first Indian scientist in colonial India, Bose hardly had any Indian colleagues whom he could effectively engage with intellectually when sharing his never-ending discoveries. Bose wrote, ‘We are each of us above race, above nationality, though the underdog has to take up and rejoice that he is allowed to take up the burden of his fellow sufferers. …’ (Letter to Patrick Geddes, 11 February 1918).

When Bose did engage with people in India like Tagore, Vivekananda, or Sister Nivedita, for example, science, philosophy, and nationalism amalgamated into a new form. Although this excited and inspired him, it ultimately was responsible for affecting his scientific temperament. His urge to establish a ‘unifying’ theory was already sowed deep during his childhood but did not germinate until he met some remarkable Indians, including Nivedita and Tagore, who became his soul mates. When it came to discussing the nitty-gritty of his scientific discoveries, however, he could only fall upon his Western friends.

Despite being a ‘rural Bengali’ at heart, Bose matured into more of an English gentleman rather than a Bengali bhadralok. I don’t just mean the way he dressed, but more the sort of intellectual associations and infatuations he pursued at Christ’s College, where he studied Natural Sciences.

Bose knew that to leave a mark, his research would need to be carefully vetted, and it so happened that the most cutting-edge scientific discoveries of the time were mainly coming out of the West. His longing to be recognised in the West was rooted in the formative years he spent there, and this often made him intellectually closer to the West. This alludes to why there are so many Western characters in Das’s book.

In addition to dealing with his scientific research—its impact on his Western peers and often defensive eulogy by his Indian supporters in times of Western rejection—Bose also had to deal with the growing Nationalism in the country. His apparent softness towards the colonial rulers seemed inconsistent with his lifelong effort to establish a research institute by Indians, for Indians, and of Indians.

When Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, Bose, knighted in 1917, did not. Bose was no longer a government servant, so there was technically nothing stopping him from renouncing an honour bestowed upon him by the colonial government. In fact, it was the very ‘nationalist’ institute he was trying to establish that made him mellow—he needed funds from the government to sustain it. Das writes, ‘He needed the British by his side to support his Temple of Science.’ Earlier, too, while working at Presidency College, he needed funds to sustain his experimental science. Moral compromise with funders is not unknown and continues among active experimental scientists even today, though there are some notable exceptions. Das also subtly touches upon this point.

***

Das effectively ends his story in 1911, the year Sister Nivedita passes away and 26 years before Bose’s own demise. This symbolic end to Bose’s life also emphasises the constant intellectual and emotional support he derived from Sister Nivedita. Interestingly, Sara Chapman Bull, who became a mother figure and whose generous philanthropy supported him when he needed it most, also died in 1911.

Even many years after Sister Nivedita and Sara Bull’s absence, Bose felt they were with him: ‘… perhaps I am carrying out the wishes of those who loved me, and to whom I can offer nothing but my work as an offering. Now Sister Nivedita and Mrs Bull both wished and even plotted that we would know each other and be more than friends. During their lifetime there was not the slightest possibility of their wish being fulfilled. And now in ways I cannot understand things are shaping that way. Is it merely auto-suggestion or is it something deeper? What say you?’ (Letter to Patrick Geddes, 15 February 1918).

Sudipto Das’s account of Bose and his life includes both the aspects of Bose being a ‘pioneer in science who happens to be an Indian, and a pioneer of science in and for India’ and even goes beyond by bringing out the man in his fullest form. Embedded within the dynamically shifting landscape of India’s own tumultuous political history and the rapid scientific paradigm shifts happening in the West, Das describes Bose’s triumphs failures, and conflicts.

Prof. Gautam Basu

Formerly of Bose Institute

The Main Characters

BOSE, Abala (1864–1951): Bose’s wife

BULL, Sara Chapman (1850–1911): A disciple of Swami Vivekananda and a key player in spreading Vedanta in the West. Bose’s ‘Dearest Mother’, sponsor, patron, and co-applicant in all his patents.

CROFT, Alfred (1841–1925): Director of Public Instruction, Bengal. Initially opposed Bose’s appointment as the first native science professor in the Imperial Service, but later became his friend and patron.

DUTT, Romesh Chunder (1848–1909): Indian civil servant and India’s first economic historian. Frequented Bose’s London residence during 1900–02.

FLEMING, John Ambrose (1849–1945): Electrical engineer and physicist. Designed the radio transmitter for Marconi’s first trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy in 1901.

HERTZ, Henry (1857–1894): German scientist who proved the existence of the mystic Electromagnetic waves. The year he died at the age of 36, Bose decided to dedicate his life to science, starting with his research on the Hertzian waves of very small lengths.

JACKSON, Henry (1855–1929): Commander of HMS Defiance, the torpedo training school at Devonport. Created the world’s first functioning and practical wireless system in 1895 using Bose’s spiral spring receiver.

LAFONT, Eugene (1837–1908): Bose’s teacher at St. Xavier’s. Introduced Bose to physics.

LODGE, Oliver (1851–1940): Creator of the ‘coherer’, the receiver widely used by all the early researchers of wireless telegraphy.

MARCONI, Guglielmo (1874–1937): Winner of the 1909 Nobel in physics as a co-inventor of radio.

MAXWELL, James Clerk (1831–1879): Mathematical physicist, a sarcastic poet, and the reckoner of the Modern Age in physics. Envisaged the existence of the Electromagnetic waves many years before Hertz proved its existence.

NIVEDITA, Sister (1868–1911): ‘Lady of the Lamp’ in Bose’s life, his closest friend, a secretary for all practical purposes, and a collaborator, too.

RAY, Prafulla Chandra (1861–1944): First modern chemist of India. Bose’s colleague at Presidency College and a lifelong friend.

STRUTT, John William, Lord Rayleigh: (1842–1919): Bose’s physics teacher at Christ’s College, Cambridge, communicator of most of his scientific papers to the Royal Society, and his lifelong patron and promoter.

TAGORE (Thakur), Rabindranath (1861–1941): ‘The World Poet’ from Bengal and the first Asian Nobel laureate. A lifelong friend and patron of Bose.

TAWNEY, C.H. (1837–1922): Principal of Presidency College. Was initially an opponent of Bose but eventually turned friend and backer, like Croft.

TESLA, Nikola (1856–1943): Father of AC machine and co-inventor of radio. Vivekananda was the common spiritual link between him and Bose.

THOMSON, William, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907): The grand old man of science, a Baron, a mathematical physicist transitioned into a successful engineer, and an ever patronising and inspiring father figure to Bose.

VINES, Sydney (1849–1934): Bose’s botany teacher at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and one of the few who was always on Bose’s side when he transgressed into multiple disciplines outside physics.

VIVEKANANDA, Swami (1863–1902): A ‘Hindoo’ Prophet of Modern India. A fiery monk who played an important role in popularising Indian spirituality in the West. Inspired scientists like Tesla and Bose.

WALLER, Augustus (1856–1922): Eminent physiologist and the inventor of the electrocardiogram (ECG). Remained a zealous opponent of Bose till the end.

Part I

In Search of Unity

The Prologue

The King is dead; long live the King!

Death is frightening. But the fear of death is not so much the thought that one would not enjoy this wonderful world anymore, or that one’s work would be left unfinished. The thought that one’s absence will not make a difference to anyone anywhere is both humbling and scary.

Most great people did not seek immortality through their work. They simply worked to serve humanity in some way, to create artefacts that would give joy to the world. Why is Newton still invoked by millions 300 years after his death? Was Mozart hankering after immortality when he was composing the Requiem from his deathbed? The anonymous painters of Ajanta, who come alive every time someone stands spellbound in front of their millennia-old creations, were they seeking immortality? All they wanted was to leave something for posterity to rejoice in. Creators die when their creations become irrelevant. This living death is far more frightful. Their only hope is that someone will bring them back to life again. Like Captain John Smith who accidentally discovered the caves of Ajanta in 1819, and resurrected those anonymous painters and their art.

Jagadis Chunder Bose’s story is also one of resurrection, of his works and his life.

***

Einstein reportedly said, ‘If only for a single one of his many discoveries, Bose should have a statue erected to his memory.’

Einstein met Bose in 1926 in Geneva when they both attended a meeting of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of the Nations. Bose had been inducted into the committee a year before and was already a much-decorated man, the latest honour conferred on him being the Commandeur de l’Ordre de Léopold, by the King of Belgium during this visit. Bose was to give a lecture at the University of Geneva before a distinguished gathering, which included two of his fellow committee members, Einstein and Hendrik Lorentz, the grandmasters of modern physics and founders of quantum mechanics.

By the time he met Bose in Geneva, Einstein was already in the long and lonely phase of his life, which remained until the end. He had become sceptical and critical about quantum mechanics, the very foundation on which his earlier work stood. On the philosophical plane as well, he felt alienated from the prevalent notion that certainty does not exist in the subatomic realm, that everything is probabilistic. It was not that Einstein failed to understand what the rest of the scientific world had accepted as reality. However, his philosophical mind always searched for simplicity and a unified theory about everything, into which the quantum theory, with all its complicated statistical and probabilistic models, failed to fit.

Perhaps, Einstein’s appreciation of uniformity, the simple rhythms of life and nature, and his painful search for it till the end of his life attracted him to Bose. His admiration for Bose was probably more for his philosophy in work and life, especially his world view, rather than for his science. In Bose, who spoke passionately of uniformity, continuity in the living and non-living, in plants and animals, Einstein must have seen the same quest for unity in everything that he, too, was driven towards—the search for a unified field theory that would tie together electricity, magnetism, gravity, and quantum mechanics.

Bose and Einstein had both defied norms. Einstein had first gone against the widely accepted classical Newtonian viewpoint, armed with his radically different relativity theories. Later, he was again at variance with the norm, that is the quantum theory. He seemed to be in search of a counterpoint which would challenge his views and those of others, and in the process, help him create a more robust theory.

Bose too was constantly questioning commonly accepted principles. He was not always correct in his assumptions, but he needed to question in order to evolve a new, cohesive theory.

Ironically, the very philosophy of Bose that had fascinated Einstein was to become Bose’s nemesis.

***

In the 1960s, Ashis Nandy, the political psychologist and social activist, wrote, ‘Bose’s idiom sounds flat and outdated even in his own country. Though his memory survives among important sections of Indian intellectuals and popular versions of his life offer a significant role model to young Indian scientists, his scientific work has already been stripped of its past glamour.’ He concluded that Bose died a lapsed scientist and a half-forgotten mystic.

What Nandy might have meant is perhaps explained in these lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali. They, in a sense, express the crux of Bose’s scientific works:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

When the poet (Tagore) could talk science, it was natural to expect his friend, the scientist, to speak poetry as well. And he did. In April 1911, two years before Tagore was awarded the Nobel, Bose delivered the Bengal Literary Conference’s presidential address at Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh. His subject was Literature and Science. ‘The poet,’ he said, ‘seeing by the heart, realises the inexpressible and strives to give it expression. His imagination soars, where the sight of others fails, and his news of realms unknown finds voice in rhyme and metre.’ He elaborated, ‘Both poet and scientific worker have set for themselves the same goal, to find unity in the bewildering diversity.’

In a frenzy to detect the ‘same stream of life’ and ‘unity in the bewildering diversity’, in living and non-living, in plants and animals, Bose proclaimed—and he supported it with the results of an extensive body of experiments—that metals respond to an external stimulus, like an electric shock, a mechanical pinch, and drugs, very much like animal tissues. He also said that all plants possess the equivalent of a well-developed nervous system, have an electro-mechanical pulse, a kind of vegetable heartbeat, and are capable of intelligent behaviour, memory and learning.

Even as Bose was making such grandiose announcements not only was the transgression of a physicist into the realms of a chemist bitterly contested, even the confluence of literature and science was debated. This even though science had been considered Natural Philosophy in the West for a long time.

Bose was ridiculed in academic circles for being disconnected from the prevailing state of knowledge and totally unacquainted with other scholars’ research. Such reactions to Bose’s work, more than a hundred years ago. is understandable.

But interestingly, Bose was hailed by the theologists in the West. Many tabloids gave him a favourable response. One even quoted a line from one of Shelley’s poems—A sensitive plant in a garden grew—to introduce Bose’s research on Plant Response.

That was much before cybernetics, biophysics, plant neurobiology and other such multidisciplinary subjects were heard of.

***

In Bengal, there has always been a ‘Boseian’ myth that Bose was the inventor of the radio and that Marconi ran away with the radio and the glory that came with it. Bose’s research on plant response and plant physiology was too abstract to be part of any popular myth, so it was simplistically clubbed into one grand claim—Bose had discovered that plants too are alive, like us.

Bose himself never claimed that he had invented the radio. Twelve years after Marconi received the Nobel Prize for wireless telegraphy, Bose wrote, in a Bengali article published in 1921, ‘Invisible light passes easily through bricks and walls. So, somebody could as well use it for telegraphy without wires. I had demonstrated many experiments about that at the Town Hall in Calcutta in 1895.’ He went on to say that Marconi took patents for wireless telegraphy. ‘His extraordinary efforts and skill in advancing the practical usage of science have brought in a new age. Distance has totally vanished from the world…’

Bose was indeed not the inventor of the radio, but neither was Marconi. However, Bose was a pioneer in many things connected to Radio Science. Ironically, at home, he was being celebrated for what he did not do, and the rest of the world forgot what he actually did do.

Though Bose worked on Radio Science, more specifically the Optics of Radio Waves, only between 1894 and 1899, he left behind many significant findings. Walter Houser Brattain was perhaps the first to discover these long-forgotten works of Bose related to the radio. While tracing the history of semiconductor research, Brattain and his co-author observed: ‘The demonstration of the existence of radio waves by H Hertz in 1888 created a potential demand for a suitable detector, but it was not realised until 1904 that semiconductor rectifiers were well suited for this purpose.’

1904 was the date when Bose was awarded the only American patent he had applied for in 1901, a year before Brattain was born. Bose’s invention for the patent was a simple receiver for radio signals. It is one of the earliest known ancestors of a semiconductor device, and the first one to be patented.

In 1956 Brattain shared, with two others, the Nobel Prize for the invention of the point-contact transistor, a ground-breaking semiconductor device. Its later avatars are now the building blocks of everything that has electronics in it.

Close to four decades after Brattain discovered Bose’s patent, scientists at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Kitt Peak, Arizona, were working on their latest 12-m telescope. They needed a compact mechanism to accurately control the intensity of the radio waves, 1.3 mm in wavelength. Their search for the most optimal attenuator led them to Bose’s invention—a simple double prism setup he had used in the 1890s, almost a century earlier.

Bose’s double prism experiment was described in standard textbooks worldwide since 1910. But for some unknown reason, his name was missing. Even the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman described the same experiment in his famous The Feynman Lectures on Physics in 1963, but without mentioning Bose’s name. Either through ignorance or oversight.

When Bose had used the double prism to control the intensity of the radio waves he was experimenting with, he was not even aware that he was possibly the first person to have observed what is known as Quantum Tunnelling.

A special issue of the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1998 brought to light Bose’s works on the radio, undertaken as long back as 1894–99. This announcement served to reinforce the Boseian myth in Bengal about his invention of the radio.

‘The enquirer must follow where he is led,’ Bose had once said, ‘holding the quiet faith that things which appear today to be of no use, may be of the highest interest tomorrow. No height can be climbed without the hewing of many an unremembered step…’ His comment turned out to be prophetic, for when the standards for the fifth generation of cellular networks—5G—were being worked out, it was discovered that the very small radio waves, a few millimetres in length, had been first used for wireless communication by Bose in the 1890s. Since then, the millimetre waves have been used for many other things but never for communication.

While the story of Bose’s resurrection is undoubtedly exciting, the mystery of why he was forgotten is more intriguing. Did he know that he was gradually lapsing as a scientist, despite all the decorations and honours received at home and abroad? Did he even realise that his close associates were embarrassed by some of his later works which came in for severe criticism? Did he feel that his idea of science was changing rapidly and that his own students were also moving away from it? How did he react to his slowly fading relevance?

Some of these questions can only be answered by conjectures. However, one thing is clear. Bose held on to his beliefs until the end, at times insisting that his assistants fudge the results of experiments if they did not corroborate his viewpoint.

***

According to Probir Kumar Bondyopadhyay, the forensic historian of wireless, Bose’s personal life is a saga of his enigmatic relationships. Who was this American lady to whom