An excerpt from ‘Einstein and the Quantum’ by A.Douglas Stone

 A few days ago Ashutosh Jogalekar recommended the book ‘Einstein and the Quantum’ by A. Douglas Stone. It has an interesting section on S.N.Bose which seems to suggest that Bose did not quite realise what he did. He also seemed to have missed a good opportunity. “…..Bose tarried in Paris nearly a full year learning x-ray techniques before working up the courage to move on to Berlin in October of 1925 and finally meeting Einstein a few weeks later. In the intervening year, Einstein had taken up Bose’s novel counting method and extended it to treat the quantum ideal gas, leading to truly remarkable discoveries, about which Bose was unaware. For Bose, “the meeting was most interesting. . . . he challenged me. He wanted to find out whether my hypothesis, this particular kind of statistics, did really mean something novel about the interaction of quanta, and whether I could work out the details of this business.” During Bose’s visit, Werner Heisenberg’s first paper came out on the new approach to quantum theory known as matrix me- chanics (of which we will hear more later). Einstein specifically suggested that Bose try to understand “what the statistics of light quanta and the transition probabilities for radiation would look like in the new theory.”33 However, Bose was not able to make progress. He seems to have had a difficult time assimilating these rapid new developments and wrote some- what despairingly to a friend: “I have made an honest resolution of working hard during these months, but it is so hard to begin, when once you have given up the habit.”

A review of the book