
J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s - userbinator
https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html
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anilgulecha
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose)

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archgoon
> 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?

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andkenneth
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.

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

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programmer_dude
> 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.

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srean
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.

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

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

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avian
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.

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

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kulu2002
Informative. Thanks for sharing the article.

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

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shiven
_overpriced Bluetooth speakers_

What other BT speakers are _quantitatively_ better and cheaper?

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DiabloD3
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.

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JadeNB
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](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.

