THE BIRTH OF QUANTUM STATISTICS

BOSE, [SATYENDRANATH].

Plancks Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese.

Berlin, Springer, 1924. 8vo. In contemporary halv cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In "Zeitschrift für Physik", Bd. 26, 1924. Entire volume offered. Stamp to front free end-paper and titlepage, otherwise fine and clean. Pp. 178-81. [Entire volume: IV, 401 pp.].

First appearance of Bose's seminal paper in which he succeeded in deriving the Planck blackbody radiation law without reference to classical electrodynamics. Einstein was extremely impressed by Bose's paper and translated it into German himself. Shortly after Einstein made a generalization of Bose's method which led to the first of two systems of quantum statistical mechanics, known as the Bose-Einstein statistics. Paul Dirac coined the term "boson" for particles that obey these statistics and later physics historian Abraham Dirac described it as a "confused masterpiece", (Pais, Inward Bound, P. 283). "With their work Bose and Einstein established the field of quantum statistics one year before the appearance of quantum mechanics" (Brandt, The Harvest of a Century, P. 139).

"In July 1924 he sent a short manuscript entitled "Plancks Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese" to Albert Einstein for criticism and possible publication. Einstein himself translated the paper into German and had it published in the Zeitschrift für Physik later that year. He added a note that stated: "In my opinion Boses derivation of the Planck formula signifies an important advance. The method used also yields the quantum theory of the ideal gas as I will work out in detail elsewhere." (DSB).

"2 July 1924. Satyendra Nath Bose introduces a new coarse-grained statistical counting procedure which leads to Planck's radioation law. [...] Bose's discovery of a new statistics for photons and Einstein's extension to material gases - including the phenomenon of BE condensation - were made well before anyone had ever heard of a Schroedinger wave function. Bose's derivation of Planck's law is a confused masterpiece. His reasoning is correct but, as he himself once said, he had no idea that it was novel. The Paper also contains the discovery of BE condensation, an effect without application at that time." (Pais, Inward Bound, P. 283-4).

The present volume contains the following papers of interest:
Fermi: Über die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Quantenzustände.
Hahn & Meitner: Über die Rollen der beta-strahlen beim Atomzerfall.
Heisenberg: Über den Einfluss der Deformierbarkeit der Ionen auf optische und chemische Konstanten. II.
Heisenberg: Über eine Abänderung der formalen Regeln der Quantentheorie beim Problem der anomalen Zeemaneffekte.
Born: Über Quantenmechanik.

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