Satyendra Nath Bose: The 'god particle's' India connect

Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle that could be the Higgs boson, the basic building block of the universe. The 83-year-old British physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the boson which bears his name in the 1960s, was at CERN today, and was clearly overwhelmed. "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime," he said.

Much to the discomfort of many scientists, some commentators have labelled this the "God particle." And that indeed it may be. The Higgs boson, which until now has been a theoretical particle, is seen as the key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight. The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's discovery of it: Gravity was there all the time before Newton explained it.

Interestingly, at CERN, there is a Chola bronze statue of Lord Shiva performing the cosmic dance called "Tandav" - the dance of destruction. Indian scientists are amongst those from 100 other nations working at CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, anti-matter and the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. And India has contributed high-tech equipment worth 30 million dollars and over 100 human years of expert service.

But that's not where the India connect ends. It’s much more fundamental but seems almost forgotten. The boson is named after an Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose - who lived and worked in Kolkata and Dhaka - and was a contemporary of Albert Einstein.

He made important contributions to the field of quantum physics in the 1920s - contributions that changed how particle physics has been studied ever since. Dr Bose's work on Quantum Mechanics was adopted by Einstein, who extended it to the concept of the Bose-Einstein condensate - a dense collection of bosons, sub-atomic particles with integer spin.

After his graduation from Presidency College in Kolkata, and Masters from Calcutta University, Bose joined the Physics Department of the university in 1916. In 1921, he moved to the University of Dhaka where set up whole new departments and laboratories to teach Undergraduate and Graduate courses.

Bose moved back to Kolkata in 1945, and continued to research and teach there till his death in 1974. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 1954.

Ironically, it was a 'mistake' by Bose that laid the foundations of the Bose–Einstein statistics or quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Paul Dirac.

Bose wanted to show his students at the Dhaka University that the contemporary theory was inadequate, because it predicted results not in accordance with experimental results. But he committed an error in applying the theory, which unexpectedly gave a prediction that agreed with the experiment. Realising this may not be an error in fact, he fashioned his lecture into an article and sent it off to Albert Einstein - who translated it into German - and had it published in a leading European science journal.

In what may only be termed as a grave oversight, Satyendra Nath Bose was never considered for the Nobel Prize. Yet, at least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel for their research in the field of particle physics based on concepts like the Bose-Einstein Condensate or the boson - the last one in 2001, when Eric Allin Cornell, Carl Edwin Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded for "the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

(Some parts of this write up have been published on www.ndtv.com)

Interesting mail sent to NDTV employees by Vikram Chandra

NDTV employees got a very interesting mail this evening from the CEO, Vikram Chandra... Here's what Vikram said ~

Hi all,

A completely defamatory, scurrilous and fictitious application has been made in the Patiala House Courts by a man called SK Srivastava.

The application is full of bizarre claims about NDTV together with claims of " a serialized prostitution racket" in the Income tax department.

This same man had filed a similar petition in the Delhi HC a couple of years back which the judge dismissed as follows. The full quote is worth reading!

"We find the petitioner to have made reckless and scandalous allegations against the various officials of the Income Tax department.

The petition is clearly an abuse of the process of this Court and intended to embarrass the colleagues of the petitioner in the department who are impleaded in the petition as respondents in their personal capacity. The petition is liable to be summarily dismissed on this ground alone. The Supreme Court in Gurpal Singh vs State of Punjab, (2005) 5 SCC 136 has held that in public interest litigation, nobody should be allowed to indulge in wild and reckless allegations besmirching the character of others. It was further held, that when frivolous pleas are taken, the Court should do well not only to dismiss the petition but also to impose exemplary costs; that when a particular person is the object and target, the Court has to be careful to see whether the attack in the guise of public interest is really intended to unleash a private vendetta, personal grouse or some other mala fide object.

We do not find any merit in the petition, the same is dismissed with costs of Rs.20,000/- payable by the petitioner to the respondent no.1 within six weeks from today."

NDTV has now filed a defamation suit against this person and will take similar action against anyone else who repeats complete rubbish like this.

Best

Vikram

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

My Take : Huns Dhun & displacement

This is a great video I found on You Tube - which depicts of the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. Its also one of my favourite taranas from Rāga Hamsadhwani - brilliantly done by the Mekaal Hasan band.

I was stunned by the fact that an experience of displacement in North-West Pakistan could be so well captured by a Rāga of south Indian origin.

Hamsadhwani is a janya (derivative) rāga of Shankarabharaam, the 29th Melakarta Rāga. It has a pentatonic scale and doesn't have the Madhyamam (mā) and Dhaivatam (dhā).

I first heard the rāga at the Dover Lane music conference in Kolkata. It was the concert-closer (quite appropriate since it is intended for the second quarter of the night) and it stayed with me.

Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara also has a very soulful rendition of this rāga by A Kanan. In Hindustani classical music (my apologies for making such a brouhaha of the north-south divide), Hamsadhwani is associated to the Bilalwal thāt.

Here's my lastest encounter with Hamsadhwani...