At a time everybody wants to excel, take inspiration from the lives of great people, science has always been an integral part of our lives. It revolves around numerous scientific inventions and discoveries. People living in the stone-age had to face many hardships. But the giant leap of mankind in the field of science and technology has made our lives free of all troubles.
Modern science would therefore be incomplete if we do not study the lives of scientists, who have tried and who keep on trying to make our day to day life as easy and comfortable as possible. Our aim should be to understand the hardships they had to face and also gain inspiration from their remarkable achievements.
Al-Biruni, from the Arab world, was such a scientist, who used to write on a wide variety of scientific subjects. He was born in 1973, in what is now called Uzbekistan. His important contributions as a scientist were his keen observations of natural phenomena, rather than theories. He was one of the best-known Muslim scientists of his time.
Al –Biruni wrote about 113 works, but most of them have been lost. His subjects included astronomy, astrology, chronology, geography, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, pharmacology, meteorology, mineralogy, history, religion, philosophy, literature, and magic, `India’ is his best-known work, in which he used his knowledge of Sanskrit to describe Indian customs, languages, science and geography.
Graduating in Applied Mathematics from the University of Kolkata, Bose published a number of papers in crystallography and unified field theory. He gave lectures at the Universities of Dacca and Kolkata.
`Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta’ a paper he wrote was sent to Einstein. Being impressed with Bose’s work, Einstein entered into collaboration with him, and further extended his work on the behavior of photons, which are particles of zero spin. The result is now known as Bose –Einstein statistics. Bose became Professor of physics at Kolkata University in 1945, and the Vice chancellor of Vishwabharati University in 1958. He died in 1974.