J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s | Hacker News Reader

J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s

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194 pointsuserbinator25 comments

JC Bose is a hero of mine. He was a polymath - Contributions in physics (linked article) are well know. But he is also the person who proved what is universally taken as granted: Plants are alive.

The was also a great detractor of the idea of intellectual property -- he made all of his discoveries deliberately available to the public domain.

His handling of racial discrimination at the colonial British was also pretty bad-ass!

His wiki page is a good start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose

> But he is also the person who proved what is universally taken as granted: Plants are alive.

I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about. Farmers have known that plants are alive for a very long time. Nowhere on the Wikipedia page is anything close to this being suggested.

The work he did that is described on the Wikipedia page says that he found that plants have an electrical nervous system, but I don't think that's what makes modern people think that plants are alive, so I wouldn't exactly call this something that's taken for granted.

If there is some brief controversy in the 19th century where they decided that plants couldn't be alive due to a lack of an electrical nervous system (The discovery that animals had electrical nervous systems happened in the 19th century), I have not heard of it, but perhaps this is what you are referring to? It sounds interesting if that's the case. Can you expand?

Whether he actually proved it for the first time, I'm not sure. But proof and assumed common knowledge are very different things. A simple example in a different domain, the full proof for 1+1=2 is several hundred pages and was not proved till the early 1900s, while that would have been simple common knowledge for millennia beforehand.

There's not even a hard definition of what constitutes life. He may have proven something, but it's probably more nuanced than that.

The Principia is sort of a proof that 1 + 1 = 2, but it's not that simple, we could be perfectly rigorous without it. Principia Mathematica is more of an investigation into the logical basis of mathematics that "useful" proof.

He demonstrated stimulus and response in plants, with a machine of his own invention.

"His handling of racial discrimination at the colonial British was also pretty bad-ass!"

If you have any references to any anecdotes about this, I'd love to read about it.

> Bose, even when he had built a considerable reputation in late 1890s as one of the pioneers of radio transmission, was subject to highly discriminatory treatment. He got a small fraction of the salary his English colleagues at Presidency College Calcutta received (in protest, he declined to accept any remuneration for his work until it was corrected), his proposed paper publications in journals were blocked and there was almost a total absence of facilities for conducting research.

from: https://thewire.in/gender/scientist-nun-sister-nivedita-made...

Very interesting article, thank you for this recommendation!

What is a pity is that only mention of JC Bose happens is when he proves that Plants are living things. Thats it. 12 years of studies, 8 years with Science as subject and he gets just a paragraph at best.

PS: This is from State board in India.

> Although it appears that Bose's demonstration of remote wireless signalling has priority over Marconi, he was the first to use a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves, and he invented various now commonplace microwave components, outside of India he is rarely given the deserved recognition. Further work at millimeter wavelengths was almost nonexistent for nearly 50 years. J.C. Bose was at least this much ahead of his time.

What I find odd is surprising silence around how Marconi ended up with a very similar Mercury based coherer that J.C. Bose had designed.

Is it that surprising, really? People with money have been stealing shit since forever.

Where did you see the claim that he invented the mercury coherer?

Does anyone have a good reference on the physics behind the "single point iron receiver"? It seems similar to a crystal detector, but the description here suggests that both the needle and the "crystal" are the same material (iron). My guess would be that the non-linear effect is due to iron oxides on the surface.

Just to add, J.C. Bose also authored first science fiction in bengali language.

Informative. Thanks for sharing the article.

He's probably pretty uncomfortable in his grave knowing that his name is used to sell overpriced Bluetooth speakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_(surname)

overpriced Bluetooth speakers

What other BT speakers are quantitatively better and cheaper?

The ones without Bluetooth at all. Most of the audio problems in Bluetooth speakers isn't that they're low end garbage, but because Bluetooth mangles audio.

Regardless of the facts of the matter on fidelity of Bluetooth audio, surely this question:

> What other BT speakers are quantitatively better and cheaper?

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17538351) to which you are replying, which explicitly asks a question only about Bluetooth speakers, in no way has this answer:

> The ones without Bluetooth at all.

Stick to the topic of the thread, please!

You are confusing him with Amar Bose, known for founding the Bose audio company, popularizing satellite speakers and subwoofers, inventing active noise cancellation technology, creating the first quality factory car stereo, and pioneering the dummy head based acoustic research that led the way for modern headphone and spatial audio innovation.[0][1]

[0]http://noaudiophile.com/Bose_901/ [1]https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/curious-geniu...

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