I much enjoyed Soma Banerjee’s article “Meghnad Saha: Physicist and nationalist” (Physics Today, August 2016, page 38), particularly for its bringing attention to Saha’s English translation, with Satyendra Nath Bose, of Albert Einstein’s and Hermann Minkowski’s papers. Their translation was published by the University of Calcutta in 1920.
Many English-language readers of the papers found them in a later translation, first published in 1923 by Methuen in London. A paperback edition of that translation, The Principle of Relativity (Dover Publications), is still in print today.
In a letter to Einstein posted from Dacca University on 4 June 1924, Bose, then unknown internationally, introduced himself:
I do not know whether you still remember that somebody from Calcutta asked your permission to translate your papers on Relativity in English. You acceded to the request. The book has since been published. I was the one who translated your paper on Generalised Relativity.
That letter also contained a copy of Bose’s own English-language manuscript on the statistics of photons, which had been rejected for publication by the Philosophical Magazine. As aficionados of Bose–Einstein condensation know, Einstein, then already a world-famous scientist, soon arranged for Bose’s paper to be translated into German and published in Zeitschrift für Physik.
The rest is history—though seemingly lost in its mists is the English original of Bose’s famous paper. I’ve sought it for some time. Do any readers know its location?