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!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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