A tribute to Dr Satyendra Nath Bose with discovery of Higgs Boson

Satyendra Nath BoseThe Discovery of Higgs Boson is a tribute to great Indian Physicist Dr. Satyendranath Bose. The Word Boson  has actually been derived from his surname.  It was Dr Bose, who first gave the idea of Bosons.

Bosons are particles which obey Bose–Einstein statistics: when one swaps two bosons, the wavefunction of the system is unchanged

Bosons are one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, the other being  fermions. This class of particles includes photons and gluons, as well as the Higgs boson.

Bose was born in Calcutta, British India, the eldest of seven children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering Department of the East Indian Railway Company. He married Ushabati at the age of 20.

A Polyglot, he was well versed in several languages such as Bengali, English, French, German and Sanskrit as well as poetry of Lord Tennyson, Rabindranath Tagore and Kalidasa. He could also play the esraj, a musical instrument similar to a violin. He was actively involved in running night schools that came to be known as the Working Men’s Institute.

In 1924, while working as a Reader at the Physics Department of the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a paper deriving Planck’s quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics and using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. This paper was seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics.

Though not accepted at once for publication, he sent the article directly to Albert Einstein in Germany. Einstein, recognizing the importance of the paper, translated it into German himself and submitted it on Bose’s behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. As a result of this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and crystallography laboratories, during which he worked with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Einstein.

In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his only book on science, Visva-Parichay, to Satyendra Nath Bose.

He was honored with title Padma Vibhushan by the Indian Government in 1954. In 1959, he was appointed as the National Professor, the highest honor in the country for a scholar, which he held for 15 years.  In 1986 S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences was established by an act of Parliament, Government of India, in Salt Lake, Calcutta in honour of this world renowned Indian scientist.

Bose became an adviser to then newly formed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He was the President of Indian Physical Society and the National Institute of Science. He was elected General President of the Indian Science Congress.   He was the Vice President and then President of Indian Statistical Institute. In 1958 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society London. He was also nominated as member of Rajya Sabha.