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British Physicist Peter Higgs of the ‘Higgs-Boson’ is a familiar name in the world of science. However, it is not well known that the term Boson, owes its name to the pioneering work of the late Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose. He is a forgotten hero, even in India, even though he won a world wide fame for his association with the great Albert Einstein in developing a theory of the particle-like qualities of light. His pioneering work on the quantum theory of light provided the foundation for Bose-Einstein Condensates, a new state of matter in which thousands of atoms condense into a single giant atom that behaves like a wave. Particles that follow Bose’s statistics have been named bosons in his honour.
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Bose first visited Paris in 1924, where he stayed for a year. He conducted research in the Madame Curie Laboratory, which had special facilities. The next year, he left Paris for Berlin to join Einstein and work with him. There he came into close contact with noted scientists like Schroedinger and Heisenberg.
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Bose, who worked with Albert Einstein to bring out the Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of Bose-Einstein Condensate in the 1920s, was a natural candidate for a Nobel Prize which he never got. Yet, at least ten 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.
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Back home, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his only book on science – Vishwa Parichay to him. The Government of India conferred the Padma Vibhushan award on Satyendranath Bose in 1954.
