Partha Ghose

Partha Ghose (born 1939) is an Indian physicist, author, philosopher, musician and former professor at the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Kolkata. He is the former Chairman of Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata.

Life and works

Partha Ghose is one of India's best known popularizers of modern science. He has written influential papers and booksP. Ghose, Testing Quantum Mechanics on New Ground, Cambridge University Press, UK, April 1999." on physics as well as popular books on science.P. Ghose and D. Home, Riddles in Your Tea Cup, Rupa & Co., 1990, Adam Hilger, UK, Sept 1994. The book has been published in several Indian languages, Italian, Japanese and Turkish.P. Ghose, ''Solar Eclipse : The Celestial Diamond'', Harper-Collins of India, 1996. He was an anchorperson in the popular Indian TV shows Quest and Eureka. He has directed plays and appeared in media programmes and films including the National Award-winning film 'The Quantum Indians', which is about great Indian scientists Satyendranath Bose, C. V. Raman and Meghnad Saha.

Ghose received the National Award for the Best Science and Technology coverage in the Mass Media of the National Council for Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC) for the period 1986–1990. He was also awarded the Indira Gandhi Prize for the popularization of science by the Indian National Science Academy.

He is best known in the physics world for his significant contributions to theoretical physics, particularly the foundations of quantum mechanics.

(i) His paper in collaboration with D. Home and G. S. AgarwalP. Ghose, D. Home and G. S. Agarwal, 'An Experiment to Throw More Light on Light', Physics Letters. A vol. 153, 403–406 (1991). (the GHA experiment) in unraveling the nature of wave–particle duality in single-photon experiments led to its experimental verification by Y. Mizobuchi and Y. OhtakeY. Mizobuchi & Y. Ohtake, 'An "experiment to throw more light on light"', Physics Letters A, vol. 168, pp. 1–5 (1992). in Japan and later by M. Genovese and collaboratorsG. Brida, M. Genovese, M. Gramegna and E. Predazi, ‘A conclusive experiment to throw more light on "light" ’, Physics Letters A, vol. 328, pp. 313–318 (2004). in Italy. This work has been widely referred to and has found place even in popular texts.,G. Venkataraman, Quantum Revolution: What is Reality, Vignettes in Physics, Sangam Books, 1994.John Gribbin, Schrődinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, Phoenix Paperback, 1996.

(ii) His work on Bohmian trajectories of photonsP. Ghose, A. S. Majumdar, S. Guha and J. Sau, ‘Bohmian trajectories for photons’, Physics. Letters A vol. 290, pp. 205-213 (2001). formed the basis for a comparison of these trajectories from those that were later observed experimentally with weak measurements.Sacha Kocsis, Sylvain Ravets, Boris Braverman, Kris-ter Shalm, Aephraim M. Steinberg: ‘Observing the trajectories of a single photon using weak measurement’, Science 3, June 2011, vol. 332 no. 6034, pp. 1170–1173, (abstract)

(iii) He has also made a pioneering contribution by showing that 'entanglement' can occur in classical polarization optics resulting in violations of Bell-like inequalities hitherto believed to be exclusive to quantum systems.P. Ghose and M. K. Samal, ‘EPR Type Nonlocality in Classical Electrodynamics!’,arXiv: uant-ph0111119, 22 November 2001. This has led to many investigations and experiments confirming such violationsP. Ghose and A. Mukherjee, ‘Entanglement in Classical Optics’, Reviews in Theoretical Science vol. 2, pp. 1-14 (2014). and consequently to a shifting of the boundary between quantum and classical physics.Xiao-Feng Qian, Bethany Little, John C. Howell, and J.H. Eberly, ‘Shifting the Quantum-Classical Boundary: Theory and Experiment for Statistically Classical Optical Fields’, arXiv: 1506.01305 uant-ph25 June 2015.

Ghose's exposition of Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy and music has found expression in several scholarly papers. He served as the Hon. Secretary of the Visva-Bharati Music Board for a few years.

He also served as a member of the Working Group on National Language Policy, Knowledge Commission, Govt of India.

Awards

* ABP Ananda Sera Bangali Award: 2022

References

;Books edited
* "Solitons and Nonlinear Systems", Proc. of the Seminar-cum-Workshop on Solitons and Nonlinear Systems, Calcutta, eds. D. K. Sinha and P. Ghose, South Asia Publishers, New Delhi, 1986.
* "Particle Phenomenology in the 1990s", Proc. of the Second International Workshop in High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP II), Calcutta, Jan. 1991, eds. A. Datta, P. Ghose and A. Raychaudhuri, World Scientific, Singapore, 1992.
* "CP Violation: 25 Years Since its Discovery", Proc. of a Topical Meeting to Celebrate 25 Years of the Discovery of CP Violation, Calcutta, Jan. 1990, eds. A. Datta, P. Ghose and A. Raychaudhuri, Wiley Eastern.
* "S. N. Bose : The Man and his Work" (Parts I & II) (eds. C. K. Majumder, P. Ghose, E. Chatterjee, S. Chatterjee & S. Bandyopadhyay), SNBNCBS, Calcutta, 1994.
* "Particle Physics & Cosmology at the Interface", BCSPIN-IOP-SNBNCBS Winter School Lecture Notes - Vol I, eds. J. C. Pati, P. Ghose & J. Maharana World Scientific, Singapore, 1995.
* "Highlights of Particle Phenomenology", Proc. of the Fourth Workshop in High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP IV), eds. A. Datta, P. Ghose and A. Raychaudhuri, Allied Publishers Ltd., 1997.
* "Materialism and Immaterialism in India and the West: Varying Vistas", PHISPC Vol XII, Part 5, Centre for Studies in Civilizations, New Delhi, 2010 (903 pages).
* "The Poet and the Scientist", a comprehensive account of the correspondence and dialogues between Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein, their background and impact, Visva-Bharati, 2014.
* "Einstein, Tagore and the Nature of Reality", Routledge, London 2017.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ghose, Partha
1939 births
Living people
20th-century Indian physicists
University of Calcutta alumni
University of Calcutta faculty
Indian scientific authors
Indian technology writers
Indian social sciences writers
Indian popular science writers
Scientists from Kolkata