Two other outstanding Calcutta scientists were Satyendranath Basu and Meghnad Saha, born within three months of each other and both educated at Presidency College. Shortly after Einstein’s relativity theory received dramatic confirmation in 1919, Basu (1894-1974) and his classmate Saha (1893-1956) prepared an English translation of Einstein’s papers, which was published by the University of Calcutta. In 1921 Basu left for Dhaka, where in 1924 he gave a new theoretical derivation of Planck’s famous radiation law (which ushered in the quantum theory) without any reference to the classical electromagnetic theory. In this paper, translated into German by Einstein himself and published in the Zeitschrift fur Physik, Basu introduced a new form of statistics, which Einstein successfully extended to material atoms. ‘Bose Statistics” forms one of the cornerstones of modern quantum theory. Particles, which follow Basu’s quantum statistics, have been named ‘bosons’.

Basu returned to Calcutta in 1945 as Khaira Professor of Physics at the University, where he developed a laboratory for X-ray crystallography and thermo luminescence studies and pioneered a powerful scanning method of recording the weak spectra of alkali halides. In the early 1950’s he became interested in Einstein’s unified field theory, on which he published some fundamental papers in French. He founded the Bangiya Bignan Parishad (Bengal Science Association) in 1948 for the cultivation of a scientific culture among common people through the medium of the mother tongue. Rabindranath  dedicated his boo on science, Bishwa-Parichay, to Satyendranath. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958.