Indian physicist and physiologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was recently among the nominated names to become the face of United Kingdom’s 50 Pound currency bill.
UK’s Bank of England – similar to India’s Reserve Bank of India – announced that it will be redesigning the 50 UK Pound currency note, replacing it with a prominent name from the world of science. Thus, the bank currently inviting suggestions from people to have a fresh new face on its 50 pound currency note.
To everybody’s surprise, on their website, the bank had received close to 175,000 nominations earlier this week, forcing them to publish a list of 114,000 nominations, which featured Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose’s name.
He is nominated alongside one of the world’s best-known physicists, Stephen Hawkings.
Among some of the other 600 men and 200 women in the early nominations list include computing pioneers Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and astronomer Patrick Moore.
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The names, once finalised after the December 14 deadline for the close of nominations, will be considered by the Bank of England’s Banknote Character Advisory Committee.
Know about Jagadish Chandra Bose
A physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist, Sir J C Bose was ahead of his time and much of his research that was ignored during his lifetime is now entering the mainstream.
Bose, who was born in Bengal during the British Raj in 1858, is credited with proving that animals and plants share much in common as a result of his very early experimentations and the creation of a very sophisticated instrument called the crescograph to detect minute responses of living organisms. He was the first scientist who convincingly demonstrated that plants possess a nervous system of their own and “feel” pain.
J C Bose later spent his life’s savings to set up the Institute which carries his name in Calcutta and Darjeeling.
Sir Jagadish died on 23rd November 1937.
On his death, friend Rabindranath Tagore said: “I found in him a dreamer, and it seemed to me, what surely was a half-truth, that it was more his magical instinct than the probing of his reason which startled out secrets of nature before sudden flashes of his imagination.”
