Higgs Boson: The Indian Legacy

by KUSHAN MITRA

The Higgs Boson, described as the The God Particle in a 1993 book by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Leon Lederman, has had its existence proved. Well, it has had its existence proved to an accuracy of 99,9999 per cent at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. With it, one of mankind’s most expensive endeavours has been completed as researchers across the world have spent billions of dollars searching for this elusive subatomic particle that completes the ‘Standard Model’ of physics.

The Higgs in the particle’s name comes from the Scottish physicist, Peter Ware Higgs, who in the 1960s predicted the existence of such a particle thanks to his ‘Higgs mechanism’. Yet, Indians should also be proud of the fact that Boson itself is named after one of India’s most famous physicists, Satyendra Nath Bose, a contemporary and collaborator with Albert Einstein, with whom he jointly worked on Bose-Einstein statistics and the Bose-Einstein Condensate while being a reader at the University of Dhaka in pre-Independence India.

The fact that Bose was never considered for a Nobel Prize in Physics rankles some to this day, and it is ironic that several Nobel Prizes were awarded to physicists who advanced the theories Bose postulated. In fact, Bose is considered the inventor of Quantum Statistics. Yet, he lent his name to one of two smallest particles of the Universe; the other named after Enrico Fermi (Fermions). The term was coined by another early quantum physicist, Englishman Paul Dirac. Bose was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954, and in 1959 he was appointed as the National Professor, the highest honour in India for any academic scholar.

But Bose was also a proud Bengali, despite being a polyglot, a person who could speak several languages; much of his later life he spent advancing the cause of Bangla as a teaching language. He was also honoured by the Government of India time and again and played a crucial role in the early years of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). After his death in 1974, the Government of India established the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Kolkata, under the Department of Science and Technology.

As quantum physicists across the world now sit to analyse the importance of the data that has been gleaned from CERN, they would find how it matches up to the theories predicted by an Indian over 80 years ago.

(Courtesy: The Pioneer)