Authors: Eric Weiner
Bose had much in common with his friend Rabindranath Tagore. Like Tagore, he borrowed heavily from the West but was by no means simply a product of the West. His scientific approach, like Tagore’s poetry, was also deeply informed by his Indian worldview. For Bose, poet and scientist share a common goal: “to find a unity in the bewildering diversity.” Bose and Tagore were monists. That is, they believed that the universe, though it may appear incredibly diverse, is one thing, and nothing can exist outside of that thing.
Bose’s career trajectory was buffeted by personal tragedy or, in the language of chaos theory, bifurcation points. Forks in the road. He was enrolled in medical school in London, en route to what would most likely have been a successful but unremarkable career as a physician, when he contracted a mysterious illness. His condition was exacerbated by the odors present in the dissecting room. It was unbearable. Reluctantly, Bose dropped out of medical school. He then took the short train ride to Cambridge, where he studied physics, chemistry, and biology. Much to his delight, he discovered that he had stumbled across his true calling: pure scientific research.
After completing his studies, Bose returned to India in 1885 and, over the objections of a few British officials, was appointed professor of physics at Hindu College. It was the most prestigious university in India but, still, by Western standards, rough and underequipped. Bose was forced to improvise and act as “technician, instrument maker, experimentalist all rolled into one,” writes Subrata Dasgupta.
Bose’s big break came in August of 1900, when he traveled to the International Physics Conference in Paris to deliver a paper. Though he didn’t know it at the time, this paper would alter the course of his career. He was nervous as he took the podium. Back in Calcutta, he had no colleagues with whom to discuss his unconventional findings, which he was now about to share with the world’s most renowned physicists.
Bose clenched his jaw, swallowed hard, and delivered his paper. He explained how, when conducting experiments into radio waves, his instruments experienced a sort of “fatigue” remarkably similar to that experienced by human muscle. After a period of “rest,” his instruments
regained their old sensitivity, leading Bose to the remarkable conclusion that inert matter is, in a way, alive. “It is difficult to draw a line and say, ‘Here the physical phenomenon ends and the physiological begins,’ or ‘That is a phenomenon of dead matter and this is a vital phenomenon peculiar to the living,’ ” he told his colleagues.
His paper was greeted with the stunned silence and incredulity that is always the fate of radically new ideas. Bose was constantly bumping up against obstacles. First, those erected by British racism and later the more formidable barrier: scientific parochialism. As a physicist conducting experiments on plant life (his latest interest), he was stepping on other specialists’ turf, with predictable reactions:
What does a physicist know about botany?
Yet it was precisely his outsider status, and perspective, that enabled Bose to conduct what Darwin called “fools’ experiments.” Who else would think to administer a dose of chloroform to a hunk of platinum, as Bose did in one of his experiments?
Bose colored outside the lines. It came naturally to him. If you believe in monism—unity in diversity—then boundaries don’t mean much to you. Fences are an illusion. Bose watched the increasing specialization of science with alarm, worried that the discipline was “losing sight of the fundamental fact that there can be one truth, one science which includes all branches of knowledge,” he wrote. One of his books opened with an epigraph from the Rig Veda, a Hindu holy text: “The real is one; wise men call it variously.”
In Indian science, the divine is never far away. “An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God,” the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan said. Bose, too, openly acknowledged an “unconscious theological bias” in his work, something I can’t imagine many Western scientists doing. Yet, Bose explained, when one approaches the world with this attitude, discoveries such as his didn’t seem so unbelievable, “for every step of science has been made by the inclusion of what seemed contradictory or capricious in a new and harmonious simplicity.”
I read that, and Brady’s words come rushing back like a monsoon cloud burst. “There is this chaotic mess of seemingly unconnected data
out there, and then someone says, ‘Wait, here is how it all fits together.’ And we like that.” All genius makes the world a bit simpler. Dots are connected. Relationships uncovered. Toward the end of his career, Bose wrote that he took great pleasure in connecting “many phenomena which at first sight do not seem to have anything in common.” Not only does that sum up Bose’s work, it is also a pretty good definition of creative genius.
Would Bose have made these discoveries without the presence of the West? Clearly, the answer is no. He would have lived out his days in his village, never attending school in Calcutta, for without the British there would be no school, no Calcutta. Yet he probably wouldn’t have made his discoveries had he been born in London and steeped in English culture. Bose was, in the words of Subrata Dasgupta, “another extraordinary example of the cross-cultural mind that characterized the Bengal Renaissance.” The “Indo-Western mind,” as he calls it, displays an extraordinary ability to “move between two worlds.”
I would argue, though, that the genius of the Indo-Western mind lies not in the Indian or the Western lobes but in the spaces between. What emerged in Calcutta in the late nineteenth century was an interstitial genius. The genius of the hyphen. Sunreta Gupta, novelist and professor of theoretical epidemiology, puts it this way: “Calcutta taught me that the best state to be poised in is in between two cultures and their productive discourse.”
Toward the end of his career, Bose established a research institute that bears his name. It’s still around today, and one day, in the midst of a ferocious monsoon downpour, I visit it. I step inside the main lecture hall and gaze at the domed ceiling and religious iconography. I feel as if I have entered not a research institute but a temple. This is precisely the reaction that Bose intended. In inaugurating the institute, he honored the role of science, but added, “There are other truths which will remain beyond even the supersensitive methods known to science. For these we require faith, tested not in a few years but by an entire life.”
Bose’s career was, appropriately, nonlinear. He suffered many setbacks, taking them in stride, for he had come to realize “that some defeat may be greater than victory.” Toward the end of his career, he became
focused—obsessed, some might say—on his hypothesis that plants possess a “latent consciousness.” He could never prove this and died “a lapsed scientist and half-forgotten mystic,” claims the scholar Ashis Nandy.
That strikes me as unduly harsh. I prefer to remember Bose by this entry from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, written shortly after his death. Bose’s work, it said, “was so much in advance of his time that precise evaluation is not possible.”
Bose’s career was the product of many things, but especially coincidence. He wasn’t looking for the “Boseian thesis,” as his work into the responsiveness of nonliving matter is now known. He stumbled across it while conducting experiments in an entirely different subject, radio waves. His instruments were acting odd and he could have overlooked this anomaly, written it off as faulty equipment, but he didn’t. He investigated.
Fast-forward thirty years to the summer of 1928 and a laboratory in London. A young microbiologist named Alexander Fleming is growing staphylococci bacteria in petri dishes, part of research into influenza he was conducting at Saint Mary’s Hospital. One day, he notices something unusual: a clear area where there shouldn’t be one.
Many biologists, perhaps most, would have thought nothing of it. But Fleming was curious. He discovered that a bit of mold had fallen into the dish when it was briefly left uncovered. The mold, belonging to the genus
Penicillium
, had killed the bacteria, thus the clear area in the petri dish. Fleming named this antibacterial agent penicillin. The world’s first antibiotic was born.
Later, Fleming reflected on the odds of making such a discovery: “There are thousands of different molds and there are thousands of different bacteria, and that chance put that mold in the right spot at the right time was like winning the Irish sweepstakes.”
Perhaps, but Fleming had a few things going for him. Having grown up on a Scottish hill farm, he was reflexively thrifty, a hoarder. He wouldn’t discard anything until he was sure he had wrung every bit of usefulness from it. So he picks up a dish of staphylococci, which he has been hoarding for days, and sees something unusual. He recognized the importance
of this anomaly for, as Louis Pasteur famously said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Over the centuries, scores of such accidental discoveries have occurred, including Archimedes’s principle, Newton’s law of universal gravitation, dynamite, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Teflon. We have a word for this kind of unexpected goodness:
serendipity
.
Serendipity
is an invented word, more than most. It was coined by the British writer and politician Horace Walpole. Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole conveyed how thrilled he was to have discovered an old book with the Capello coat of arms, which was just what he needed to adorn the frame of a cherished painting. Walpole attributes his good fortune to his uncanny ability to find “everything I wanted
à point nommé
[at the right place at the right time] when I dip for it.”
Continuing his letter, he mentions how he’s just read a remarkable book called
The Three Princes of Serendip. (
Serendip is an ancient name for the island of Sri Lanka.) The princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of,” wrote Walpole.
The key word—and one that is often overlooked—is
sagacity
. Yes, serendipitous discoveries are stumbled upon, but not by just anyone. Alexander Fleming had been studying microbiology for years when he noticed something amiss in that petri dish. Alfred Noble had long been experimenting with different forms of the highly volatile chemical nitroglycerin when he discovered a way to stabilize it, in what is now known as dynamite. Muhammed edh-Dhib, a young bedouin shepherd, was no archaeologist, but he knew something “wasn’t right” when, in 1946, he tossed a stone into a cave near Jerusalem and heard a strange sound. He had stumbled across the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
The observant mind, too, for that is essential to a serendipitous discovery. Some fifty years earlier, notes the
Encyclopedia of Creativity
, another scientist also spotted an unexplained patch of dead bacteria cells in a petri dish but didn’t consider it worth pursuing. Doing so would have taken him off track. The scientist skilled at exploiting chance is willing to
be derailed. She is more sensitive to small variations in her environment, and especially to anomalies. Taking note of,
noticing
, what others explain away is crucial to exploiting chance.
Serendipity also demands a certain restlessness. When the Princes of Serendip stumbled upon their happy accidents, they were not reclining in a La-Z-Boy. They were on the move, interacting with a varied swath of their environment. It’s known as the Kettering principle. Charles Kettering, a renowned automotive engineer, urged his employees to keep moving, for “I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”
A Spanish Gypsy proverb expresses the same idea this way: “The dog that trots about finds a bone.” Sure, it’s possible to move too quickly and miss important clues that whiz by—the dog that gallops finds no bone either—but, in general, velocity is creativity’s friend.
Calcutta may once have shone bright, but do any embers still burn? One day, I meet a local journalist and writer, Anisha Bhaduri, who I hope can help answer that question. She suggests we meet near her office at the
Calcutta Statesman.
We’re at a coffee shop inside one of the god-awful malls that Indians mistake for progress. Anisha is young with bright eyes and a quick wit. She’s telling me about her book collection, some two thousand titles (modest by Calcuttan standards, she assures me), and how as a girl she was weaned on a steady diet of Tagore, and how she’s just completed a novel herself. Though I know she’s saying all this, I’m having trouble focusing on her words, owing to a loud banging noise from nearby. It’s driving me nuts. It doesn’t seem to bother Anisha, though.
“Don’t you hear that noise?” I ask. “When is it going to stop?”
“It’s not going to stop,” she says with quiet certainty.
“Shouldn’t we say something,
do
something?”
“There’s nothing we can do.” Her voice betrays not frustration but quiet resignation.
She possesses, I realize, the natural Calcuttan ability to block out anything that is either annoying or out of her control, which, now that I think
about it, includes most things in Calcutta. Her ears register the audio just as mine but she does not hear it.
William James once said that the essence of genius “is to know what to overlook.” Bengalis are expert overlookers. One day I was walking along the banks of the Hooghly River when I spotted a group of men bathing in the filthy water. Later, I asked my friend Bomti, how could they bathe in such dirty water? “They don’t see the dirt,” he said. It’s not, he explained, that they see the dirt and decide to ignore it; they actually don’t see it. I have not yet developed this skill, this art of nonseeing and nonhearing. I am, in fact, so distracted,
infuriated,
now by the incessant banging that I nearly forget what I want to ask Anisha. Oh, yes, I wonder if, like Florence and Athens, Calcutta also suffers from a golden-age hangover. Does any of the old creative fire still smolder?
Yes, she says, it does. There’s still a thriving literary scene—witness the many bookstores. Packed along College Street, as far as the eye can see, they are typically no larger than an SUV but still manage to stock an impressive number of titles. And this is one of the few places in the world, along with Paris and certain precincts of Brooklyn, where you can declare yourself a “public intellectual” and not get laughed out of town.