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)
