The "God particle" is (also) Indian
Mumbai (AsiaNews /
Agencies) - The "God particle" has a father and not (only) the
British Peter Higgs: his name is Satyendra Nath Bose and he was an Indian
physicist. It was he who - along with Albert Einstein - in the 1920s studied and theorized about the
statistics of indistinguishable elementary particles
("Bose-Einstein"), later called bosons in his honor. Yet the world
continues to celebrate the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva, made yesterday,
and nobody seems to remember Nath Bose's vital contribution to Peter Higgs'
theory formulated in the 60s.
Born in Calcutta
in 1894, Satyendra Nath Bose was the first of seven children. His father,
Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering department of the East Indian
Railway Company. He graduated in physics and was a polyglot (he spoke Bengali,
English, French, German and Sanskrit). Satyendra Bose taught at the University of Calcutta
and to Dhaka (now capital of Bangladesh).
It was precisely in those years that he investigated Planck's law, without
reference to classical physics. In 1924, he sent the results of his research to
Albert Einstein describing a statistical model that will lead to the discovery
of indistinguishable elementary particles.
But even in life, Satyendra Nath Bose did not get much recognition for his
studies: although many scientists received the Nobel Prize in physics for
research on bosons, the Swedish
Academy never awarded the
prize to the scientist.
The Higgs boson is the particle that provides mass to all other subatomic
particles of matter, which make up matter. The first to hypothesize its
existence was the British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Since then, several
studies have questioned how it can be reproduced in order to prove its
existence. Yesterday, CERN in Geneva
confirmed the observation of such a particle, thanks to experiments performed
with the super accelerator LHC (Large Hadron Collider). For most, the Higgs
boson is known as the "God particle" because of a popular physics
book by Leon Lederman, called The God Particle:
If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question? (1993).
About 3 thousand scientists and physicists from around the world have
participated in the experiment at CERN. Of these, over 100 were Indians.
.png)
