Prof. Rajkumar Maitra

Since childhood, odds were heavily stacked against Albert Einstein. As a child he was slow in learning how to speak. At school he was hardly the best student. This made one of his teachers to predict that he would never be successul at anything. After a failed attempt to become a teacher, he got a nine-to-five job of a third-class examiner of patents at an office in Bern, Switzerland. When it seemed that the teacher’s prophecy was going to be right, Einstein pulled off something unbelievable. In 1905, he wrote five seminal research papers, heralding the advent of the rumpled and frizzy-haired absent-minded genius who went on to splash the cover of Time magazine as its ‘Man of the Century’ 45 years after his death.

To pay tributes to his contribution to physics, the United Nations has declared 2005 as the World Year of Physics. To celebrate this, the Indian Physical Society, in association with the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) and S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBNCBS), organised a two-day seminar on ‘Physics in the Trails of Einstein’ at the SINP.

Speaking on ‘Bose-Einstein Condensation: Where Many Become One and So There Is Plenty of Room At The Bottom’, Dr Rajkumar Maitra of the SINP said, “In the miracle year of 1905, Einstein showed that light is both a wave and a particle.” According to him, this new theory intrigued physicist Satyanendra Nath Bose, so much so that he wrote a short paper describing light as a gas of photons (particles of light) and sent it to Einstein.

Grasping the merit of Bose’s paper, Einstein explained that Bose’s theories could also be applied to atoms. Bose’s insights could describe an assembly of indistinguishable particles known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BSE) which could exist only at extremely low temperatures. But BSE remained an elusive entity until a few years ago. Using magnetic traps, scientists now cool rubidium atoms to produce BSEs, said Maitra.

“Unravelling the wave-particle nature of light, Einstein paved the way for new researches on light,” said Dr Deepak Mathur of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, in his speech on ‘Using Lots and Lots of Photons to Stress Matter: Science and Applications’. “Gradually, armed with laser light, scientists probed deeper into the atomic world. While doing this, they discovered that atoms, molecules and living cells could be nudged, dragged, accelerated and decelerated with short pulses of laser light.”

Besides prying open the secrets of the microscopic world, Einstein changed our perception about the Universe by propounding the theories of relativity. “Realising that special relativity didn’t resolve many mysteries of the cosmos, he invented the general theory of relativity, which, among other things, unified space with time,” said Dr Parthasarathi Majumdar of the SINP in his talk on ‘The Quantum and the Continuum: A Dichotomous Legacy’. According to him, Einstein’s theories faced a dichotomy. Not only did he proclaim that both matter and radiation consist of particles, but also show that space-time is a continuous entity, only warped at places by massive masses like stars.

“One hundred years have elapsed since 1905, and we now know that the Universe has no boundaries,” said Dr Somnath Bharadwaj of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in his speech on ‘Cosmology: The Visible and the Invisible Universe’. “Astronomers say that only five per cent of all the matter and energy that constitute Universe is visible.” According to him, the rest of the matter and energy of the Universe are invisible and undetected, and are called dark matter and dark energy.

Biplab Das