A hundred years ago, a young physics teacher in Calcutta quietly rewrote the way nature counts. On November 20, the idea he discovered, known as Bose-Einstein statistics-turns 101. It is not the kind of anniversary that usually makes headlines. There are no rockets launching or satellites blinking in the sky. Yet this century-old insight by Satyendra Nath Bose lies beneath some of the world’s most advanced technologies, shaping the twenty-first century.

The story began with a simple question Bose asked his students: What happens when we try to count tiny particles of light? In our everyday world, counting is straightforward. Ten apples mean ten individual pieces of fruit. But at the microscopic level, the rules bend. Light particles behave in a strange way-they act not like separate apples but more like a perfectly synchronised crowd. Bose realised that identical particles can merge into a shared behaviour, moving in harmony rather than individually.

The idea was so unusual that a British journal rejected his paper without review. Bose then took a bold step-he sent it directly to Albert Einstein. Einstein immediately recognised its brilliance and expanded it further. Together, their insight opened the path to a completely new understanding of matter. Decades later, this work inspired the discovery of the Bose-Einstein Condensate, a bizarre state in which atoms become so coordinated that they behave like a single “super-atom.”

One does not need to know any physics to appreciate why this matters. Bose’s discovery revealed something simple and powerful: nature often behaves in teams. And this........

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