Happy 131st Birthday to Satyendra Nath Bose (b.OTD in 1894), Indian physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics, leading to the development of Bose-Einstein statistics and the prediction of a new state of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate. Despite his groundbreaking work, Bose never received a Nobel Prize.
Your intuition can deceive you!
To underscore that, here are some interesting counterexamples in analysis (a 🧵)
1) A differentiable function ... whose derivative is not continuous
(This is f(x) = x^2 sin(1/x) for x != 0, and f(0)=0.)
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
In 1924, the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose wrote a paper on the quantum statistics of light quanta (now called photons), in which he derived Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics. He sent his paper to Albert Einstein, who was impressed by his work and translated it from English to German and submitted it to the Zeitschrift für Physik, a prestigious physics journal.
Einstein then extended Bose's ideas to matter, and predicted that atoms with even spins (called bosons) would coalesce into a single quantum state at very low temperatures, forming a new state of matter that he called Bose-Einstein condensation. However, for decades, no one was able to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a laboratory, because the required temperatures were too low and the interactions between atoms were too strong.
It was not until 1995 that Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), achieved the first atomic BEC using rubidium atoms. They cooled the atoms to 1.7 �� 10⁻⁷ K above absolute zero, which is about -273.15 °C or -459.67 °F.
Later that year, Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) produced a BEC using sodium atoms. He also demonstrated that BECs could exhibit superfluidity, which is a phenomenon where fluids flow without friction or viscosity. In 2001, Cornell, Wieman and Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for their early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates. Since then, research on BECs has expanded the understanding of quantum physics and has led to the discovery of new physical effects, such as vortices, solitons, quantum interference, atom lasers, and quasiparticle condensates.
@TheID__ @Oh_ImJustKen Then name ur books accordingly na! Bhagavat Geeta : 'a neo vaishnav perspective' hoga 'as it is' k jagah....18 mahapuran mein ek parke sabke theka leke baithe hai! Kabhi Nabadwip ake classical acharyon se gaudiya tatwa sikhke jana! 🤡
The Discovery of anti-proton ⚛️
Owen Chamberlain was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 with Emilio Segrè for their discovery of the antiproton, a subatomic particle that has the same mass as a proton but opposite electric charge.
Chamberlain was born in San Francisco, California, in 1920. He studied physics at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Manhattan Project, a U.S. research project that produced the first atomic bombs, during World War II. He worked with Segrè at Berkeley and Los Alamos, New Mexico, on nuclear physics and radiochemistry. After the war, Chamberlain continued his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi, a renowned physicist and one of the pioneers of nuclear fission. Chamberlain received his PhD in 1949 and returned to Berkeley as a faculty member. There he conducted research on alpha particle decay, neutron diffraction in liquids, and high-energy nuclear particle reactions.
In 1955, Chamberlain and Segrè used the bevatron, a powerful particle accelerator at Berkeley, to produce antiprotons by colliding protons with a copper target. They detected the antiprotons using a device called an emulsion chamber, which recorded the tracks of charged particles passing through a photographic film. The discovery of the antiproton confirmed the existence of antimatter, which had been predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928. The following year, Chamberlain and Segrè also confirmed the existence of the antineutron, another antimatter particle that has the same mass as a neutron but opposite magnetic moment.
For their groundbreaking discovery of the antiproton, Chamberlain and Segrè were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. Segrè had also discovered several other important subatomic particles, such as the technetium isotope, the first artificially produced element, and the kaon, a type of meson that revealed the existence of strange quarks.
Chamberlain’s later research work included the development of the time projection chamber (TPC), a sophisticated detector that could measure the position, momentum, and charge of particles in three dimensions. He also worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where he participated in experiments on electron-positron annihilation and deep inelastic scattering.
Chamberlain was not only a distinguished scientist but also a socially conscious citizen who advocated for peace and human rights. He was outspoken against the Vietnam War and helped found the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s. He was also a member of Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov, and Shcharansky, a group that supported three Soviet physicists who were imprisoned for their political beliefs. In 2003, he was one of 22 Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto, a statement of ethical principles that promote human dignity and social justice.
Chamberlain was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1985 and retired from teaching in 1989. He died of complications from the disease in 2006 in Berkeley at the age of 85. He was survived by his second wife Senta Pugh (whom he married in 1989), four children from his first marriage to Beatrice Babette Copper (who died in 1988), and nine grandchildren.
[image courtesy: Peter Badge and the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings]