Jagdish ChandraBose

Jagdish chandrabose ,the first creative scientist of Modern India


It was Britain’s highage of experimental science,and naturalists pondered
,experimented and pontificated within the Royal institute of science.They
were amongst the most eminent scientific Victorians of Britain.Davy,Faraday and Thomas Henry Huxley were expounding the glory
of science.On such an occasion, on a Friday evening in London on January 1897,gathered scientists to hear someone who traveled five thousand miles ,from Calcutta,to present the scientific credentials of it to the west.The lecturer was Jagdis Chandra Bose(1858-1937)a native of Bengal,the then capital of British India.He spoke to his audience with the help of the various instruments he had invented ,of the discovery of optical properties of electric waves,now called radio waves.For Bose and for India ,that was a moment of profound history.Bose’s science was the offspring of the union of science and extrascientific elements.This made him an interdisciplinary scientist who straddled on physics and life sciences.He was the first physicist as well as the first plant physiologist of India ,a pioneer in two very different scientific disciplines.He was not only interdisciplinary,but actually crossed from one discipline to another.He was the pioneer of Indian science in Modern India ,and a maker of the independent Indian science., a science made by Indian scientists in Modern India.The Asiatic society of Bengal made by Indologists was active in his period.It was studying the Indian past ,including Indian science and the Indian’s talents for metaphysical,speculative thinking ,in ancient astronomy and mathematics etc .But that was about the past.An Indian conducting experiments and scientific observations were impossible and an Indian mind is incapable of rational thinking demanded by the rational western sciences,was the general thought of the time..Bose worked in this scenario,and as Subrato Das Gupta points out in the introduction of his book,(Jagdis ChandraBose,and the Indian response to western science Oxford uty Press 1999)the space,time,politics,society and culture were against Bose and he didn’t even have the infrastructure of a laboratory to work from.He worked from a small room(20 ft square) and laboured amidst the most primitive physical circumstances as far as a laboratory is concerned.Yet produced several instruments(the names were Indian like Thejometer,Kunjometer etc) with which he could demonstrate all his points.The name of Bose is not recorded in the written history of radio waves ,or it was rather erased from it due to some unusual circumstances and personal rivalries so common among scientific communities like any other professional groups.
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In 1902 Bose crossed over from Physics to biology and drew strange parallels between responsive behaviour of living matter like muscles,plants and inorganic matter, like metals.The responsive unity amidst the diversity of natural world was due to its electromagnetic wave function which we cannot visualize (he called it Abyaktha)but still exists and energy in living matter is the same as energy in inorganic matter which later became acknowledged by western science ,as the famous equation of relativistic physics by Einstein.But ,still, the name of Bose is not mentioned by the Indian Physicists even in the history of radiowaves .He is just pictured as a Plant physiologist.The interdisciplinary approach of modern cybernetics was not born in Bose’s period and he was traveling ahead of western science was the real reason for this.He was creating prehistory of modern radiowave and electromagnetic theories and grand unification theories of astrophysics.
Bose found that the living and the nonliving exhibit similar responses to certain stimuli and there is a basic unity in responsiveness of animate and inanimate world as well.In Gillispie’s Dictionary of scientific biography ,published in 1970,it is pointed out:Today when biophysics is a generally recognized discipline ,Bose’s ideas seem less controversial,and may even be taken as forshadowing Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics.Bose’s creative genius pondered the relationship between the animate and inanimate ,between plant and animal,between ordinary and sensitive plant ,and was driven not only by science but also by culture ,aesthetics,and metaphysics.His journey was from the purely inorganic world of metals and electromagnetic waves to the organic realm of animal muscle ,plant tissue and to nerve responses as conduction of electromagnetic waves.His writings from 1902 had been one long argument in defence of his thesis.There were Bosophilic and Bosophobic botanists in his times,and some critics called his work as alternative science ,and him as a lapsed scientist and half-forgotten mystic.
A mystic is a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity or identity with the ultimate truth.But Bose’s reality was not from contemplation alone,nor from self-surrender ,but by way of remarkable,delicate,and scientific instruments one after another ,which he himself had conceived during his lifetime and built for him by an Indian tinsmith according to his instructions.There was an interplay of polarities as contemplation /experimentation and metaphysics in his creative process.The interaction of the polarities seem to lie at the heart of Bose’s genius.
Creativity is connected with originality.It may be seen as creation of a poem,novel,music,painting,scientific theory,mathematical theorem,or technology.Each field has its own criteria for originality,and if these are satisfied one is called a creative genius.Originality is always the property of the product of ones thought process.And therefore creativity is an attribute of the thought process that gave rise to the product.In this way,originality of a personal kind (psychologically original)and historical kind(historically original)occurs.Only when the relevant community of the respective field (peers/critics/scholars)judge a creation as original a product is called psychologically creative and historically creative.Bose had a sophisticated subtle Indian mind making intimate contact with western rationality named modern science.
The world contain several opposites-west and east,contemplation and experimentation,thought and action,philosophical ruminations and material instruments ,myths and empirical facts.In the pursuit of unity of all these ,Bose considered the unity of life and nonlife ,aspired for something which the scientists of his time were not even aware of,and when he spoke or wrote of his science,he resorted to language of literature as to the unemotional prose of science,just as Stephan Hawking of our times does in his writings .He was a man who straddled two cultures,two worlds,two system of values ,and in so doing emerged as the individual with a wider horizon ,keener intelligence ,a more civilized humanbeing.He was an enigma of eastern mind dwelling in the realm of western science.An interdisciplinary thinker /scientist.

Background.

Bose was born on November 30.1858,one hundred and fifty years ago,the new era of western science when the meeting of Linnaen science was held in London,and which marked the new era of British domination in India after the 1857-58 revolt,which is called as the Bengal renaissance period.His father was a Brahmo who held executive and magisterial positions in British India.He was educated till age of 11 in a Bengali Pathsaala ,not in a local English school.The father thought his son should know his own language and culture first ,and then imbibe the other cultures and languages.His classmates were ‘sons of toilers’ and those belonging to the depressed classes .Bose recollected later that he owed his love for nature to those classmates of him.Only in 1869 he went to Calcutta into the world of European education in st Xavier’s college of Belgian Jesuits.In 1880 he graduated as bachelor of arts from university of Calcutta.Then went to London to pursue his medical studies.The medical learning was interrupted due to Kala azar he contacted during his undergraduate days.In his anatomy hall his illness was exacerbated by the odours of the dissection hall and he was adviced to abandon medicine.Medicine’s loss was natural sciences gain.Bose left London for Cambridge where in January 1882 he entered Christ college to read natural sciences.In 1884 he obtained a bachelor of arts in Natural sciences.In 1883 he also got a bachelors degree in science from London.Armed with two British degrees ,his Cambridge connections and along with his Indian degree he returned to India as a scientist .He was appointed as the first Indian Professor of physics in Presidency college in 1885.Sir Alfred Croft ,the then director of Public instruction for Bengal told Bose that 40 years back Macaulay had remarked that Indians were incapable of doing science and did not have the temperament for the exact sciences.But fortunately for Bose,the viceroy ,Lord Ripon intervened and Bose was appointed inspite of the strongest protest of Croft and Mr Tawney ,principal of the Presidency college.In 1887 Bose married Abala Das,a student in Madras Medical college ,and the cousin of Desabandhu Chitharanjan Das.Thus ,though he had abandoned medical science,medicine came into his life through his marriage.

Musical analogy of wave mechanics

Bose sought to draw analogies between and unity amongst properties of light and electromagnetic waves,between visible and invisible light.He proved by his experiments that electromagnetic radiation behaves like light and the two phenomena are identical.On Friday 29th Jan 1897 in Royal institute,he lectured on electromagnetic radiation and polarization (attended by 550 people and chaired by sir James Crichton Browne.)demonstrating his findings with his instruments ,and at the end of the lecture he became oratorical and used a musical metaphor.He asked his audience to imagine a large electric organ having keys capable of producing different ether notes.The lowest key produced just one vibration in one second-a gigantic ether wave 186000 miles long.Each subsequent key produced progressively high notes.Imagine an unseen hand pressing the different keys in rapid succession .The notes will be rising gradually in frequency.When the sea of ether is thus agitated,the human witness is left unmoved since he cannot see ,feel or hear the agitation.At some point he gets the feeling of a warmth ,the infrared radiation.Then he will perceive a red light ,colours for a brief time and this is the realm of visible light .When the keys of the electric organ produce still higher frequencies our organs of perceptions fail us completely and there is again total darkness.It is this region of invisible light which I am exploring,he told the audience.His work was part of that exploration ,he reminded them.In his words human beings with their sensory organs are partially dumb and deaf and blind ,because they see or hear only part of the whole with the direct perceptions and it is like hearing only one of the octave in musicology.It is never complete unless all the seven are there,and heard ,and unless we are able to perceive the infrared and ultraviolet rays of the spectrum as well.
It is interesting that several years after this lecture, Einstein used the same figure 186000 as the speed of the Einstein train,for speed of light.The dwani/varna or acoustics/optics of India also take the same figures as in Indian astronomy and Upanishads.In his commentary on Chandogya Upanishads Sankaracharya gives the law of optics and acoustics(varna and dwani)in the modern scientific way.Whether Bose knew this or not ,we have no evidence,but it is possible that he knew.
Bose concluded his words thus:”The land from which I come did at one time strive to extend human knowledge ,but that was many centuries ago.The west had since taken over.Yet ,I would fain hope that a time may come when the east will take part in this glorious undertaking and that both west and east would one day collaborate in bringing out the manifold blessings that would follow this enterprise.”That was an Indian mind with a knowledge of western science speaking for the western audience.And when he returned to India in 1897,after lectures in Berlin and Paris ,he got a new friend .Rabindranath Tagore came to his house with an offering of magnolia flowers.


Abyaktha ,the unmanifest or inexpressible

By March 1900 attributing lifelike properties to inanimate matter had taken firm hold of Bose’s mind.On 16th March 1900 he wrote to Tagore that by his research he find the boundary between living and nonliving has been lost.His advaitha even extended to polarization between science and literature.The two cultures were not apart in Bose’s eyes.The world’s greatest poet and greatest scientist are not yet born ,he wrote to Tagore,until the two kinds of understanding ,the scientific and the poetic ,are assembled in one and the same person ,each will remain incomplete.For him the scientist and the poet were of a kind.The poet strives to express the inexpressible,sees by way of heart and imagination what others fail to see.Scientist similarly pursue a light beyond the visible light ,listens to the sound beyond the audible sound,and gathers a tremulous message .Both of them look beyond the expressed.Poet expresses in rhyme and meter ,the unknown realms .Scientist translates the abstract discoveries into human speech.Therefore he calls the realm as Avyaktha(Sanskrit word –abyaktha in Bengali)where both the poet and scientist enjoin as fellow travelers.This was quite opposite to what Aldous Huxley a novelist of the time said.The scientist according to him deals with what are essentially public or shared aspects of human experience whereas the poet /literary person is concerned with most intimate and private elements of that experience .Science strives for generalization and abstraction,literature with individual and unique.Language of science is formal jargonized for it strives to express unambiguously and with utmost clarity.Language of literature aims to convey multiplicity and the nuances of the human condition .When we compare the views ,we see that Huxley’s words are that of a onesided outlook whereas that of Bose embraces both a literary and a scientific mind,because he knew both the languages.A unified theory which is now accepted by science as well as art.

The view of Bose is that of Rgvedic monism or advaitha philosophy where Brahman the original reality wherein all matter ,all life,all laws ,whether natural or ethical were present in an unmanifest (abyaktha)state and from which the all emanated and assumed the manifest,determinate form.In his lecture on Literature and science Bose said that after generations of the quest for unity,the idea comes to us spontaneously and we apprehend no insuperable obstacle in grasping it.He said it was only after he saw the mute witnesses of his records of the electrical responses that he came to understand the message proclaimed by his ancestors,thirty centuries ago,that only those who perceive are rare, amidst the changing manifoldness,only he/she perceive truth ,unto none else ,unto none else it is revealed.
The organic is foreshadowed in the inorganic and there is a continuity of things in the world from the lowest to the highest,according to Samkhya philosophy of India,and inorganic ,vegetative and animal entities are just three stages in the evolutionary process.Only the qualities change or interact and form different varieties and the qualities(guna)in turn is due to the different combinations of Paramaanu(subatomic particle)according to Kanaada Vaiseshika theory of India.this is used in all sciences of India including astronomy and Medicine and natural sciences and it was this that Bose was finding out through the western experimental methods and instruments devised by himselves.The difference in animate and inanimate was just one of degree according to Indian science .Now the unification in science has found out this ,but when Bose spoke about it western science was not that much evolved to understand what he was talking about.Ashis Nandy stated that Bose gave a special Indian perspective to Indian science.The entry of the monistic philosophy and hence an Indian perspective marked an evolution in the scientific style of Bose which in all other respects retained its western character .A genius draws together two or more ideas which are totally unconnected by a phenomenon called bisociation and according to Albert Rothenberg(psychiatrist)these ideas are opposites or antithetical.And the thinking which connects such opposite ideas he termed Janusian.Gerald Holten wrote a genius brings to bear upon his work the harmonies and disharmonies ,the strengths and conflicts of his environment.The work of a genius has substantial aesthetic and emotional appeal and the power to move others.A powerful universal appeal,so that its effect extend beyond immeadiate domain of inquiry ,a philosophical,cultural and social significance.Genius is discovered not in splendid solutions to little problems but in the struggle with essentially eternal problems.Bose had this genius in him and his concentration was on what is eternal,not just on what is life.It encompassed both living and nonliving,both scientific and literary enquiry into eternal .Physics, biology,medicine and philosophy of ancient India joined hands with western scientific experimental evidence.He was working on an eternal ,yet invisible law that knew no change ,acting equally and uniformly throughout the organic and inorganic world in a pursuit of oneness (Advaitha)and this Indian mind armed with western science marks modern India’s scientific spirit .The fact that this is the forerunner of the modern grand unified theory and cybernetics makes Bose an alltime genius with universal appeal.

Today,on 30th of November 2008,India celebrates his 150th birthday .Indian scientists and citizens pay homage to the memory of this great genius.
(.The author a graduate in biology,postgraduate in Medicine ,is a Pathologist by profession ,and a literary person by birth , interested in astrophysics,musicology ,and a student of Sankaraacharya’s Advaitha philosophy .email id is snalapat@yahoo.com )
Ref for this article .Jagdish chandrabose and the Indian response to western science.By Subrata Dasgupta .Oxford uty press 1999.

Dr Suvarna Nalapat MD (Pathology)
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