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Bose viewing a photograph of Einstein, 1953. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Gift of Kameshwar Wali and Etienne Eisenmann
Source publication
This paper traces the social and cultural dimensions of quantum physics in colonial India where Satyendranath Bose worked. By focusing on Bose’s approach towards the quantum and his collaboration with Albert Einstein, I argue that his physics displayed both the localities of doing science in early twentieth century India as well as a cosmopolitan d...
Citations
This paper is a preliminary exploration of the connections between the statistical style of reasoning and the research practices of statistical mechanics in the early period of the long quantum revolution. It suggests that before 1925 the instantiations of the statistical style in physics went through two phases. The first phase consisted of the formulation of the Maxwell‐Boltzmann statistics on the basis of the population‐gas analogy. The second phase was characterized by the generalization of the Maxwell‐Boltzmann statistics through analogies between ideal gas molecules and other microphysical entities, analogies that shaped and were shaped by the rise of quantum theory. Einstein's invention of the Bose‐Einstein statistics started a third phase and created the conditions of possibility for a new classification of microphysical entities according to their different statistics.
Once one of the main protagonists of history of science, the historiography on quantum theory has recently gone through a process of reconfiguration of methods, research questions and epistemological framework. In this paper, I review the recent developments and propose some reflections on its future evolution.