For the Indian Father of the ‘God Particle,’ a Long Journey from Dhaka
by SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
Satyendra Nath Bose at Dacca University (now Dhaka) in Bangladesh in the 1930s. PHOTO/Falguni Sarkar/The S.N. Bose Project
In the word “boson,” as media reports have plentifully pointed out during the past two days, is contained the surname of Satyendra Nath Bose, the Calcutta physicist who first mathematically described the class of particles to which he gave his name. As was common with Indian scientists in the early 20th century, however, his work might easily have eluded international recognition. Like the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujam, Mr. Bose was saved from obscurity by a generous and influential mentor in Europe. In Mr. Bose’s case, that mentor turned out to be one of the greatest physicists of them all: Albert Einstein.
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The paper he wrote, titled “Planck’s Law and the Light-Quantum Hypothesis,” was first rejected by a referee at the London-based journal named Philosophical Magazine, which had published some of Mr. Bose’s previous papers. Undeterred, Mr. Bose sent it, in the summer of 1924, to Berlin, to the desk of Mr. Einstein, who had won his own Nobel three years earlier. Mr. Einstein received dozens of such manuscripts every day, and he was already turning away from the field of quantum mechanics to work out larger unified theories. (In “Subtle is the Lord,” Abraham Pais noted that “Einstein said of his work in quantum statistics, ‘That’s only by the way.’”) But perhaps something about Mr. Bose’s accompanying letter caught Einstein’s eye:
Respected Master,
I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. I am anxious to know what you think of it… I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper worth publication I shall be grateful if you arrange for its publication in Zeitschrift fur Physik. Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request. Because we are all your pupils though profiting only by your teachings through your writings. I do not know whether you still remember that somebody from Calcutta asked your permission to translate your papers on Relativity in English. You acceded to the request. The book has since been published. I was the one who translated your paper on Generalised Relativity.
Yours faithfully
S. N. Bose
Mr. Einstein did indeed think the paper worth publication. Within a month, he had translated and submitted it to Zeitschrift für Physik, appending a note at the end of its four concise, equation-filled pages: “In my opinion Bose’s derivation signifies an important advance.” Mr. Einstein would take Mr. Bose’s work further still, applying his statistical techniques to “count” atoms in an ordinary gas, and to discover the low-energy states of particles in the supercooled gases known now as Bose-Einstein Condensates.
The New York Times for more
Higgs boson: Pakistan’s contribution to a major breakthrough
by FAROOQ TIRMIZI
Few Pakistanis know what the Higgs boson is and even fewer realise that some of the earliest theoretical groundwork that led to this discovery was laid by Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam.
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Of the many discoveries that later solidified the Standard Model of physics was work done in 1967 by Dr Abdus Salam and American physicist Steven Weinberg in unifying the Higgs mechanism to Glashow’s theory, giving the “electroweak theory” its current form. But Dr Salam’s contributions to particle physics do not end there. Collaborating with Indian physicist Jogesh Pati, he proposed the Pati-Salam model in 1974, which further moved forward the theoretical underpinnings of the Standard Model.
It was for this body of work that Salam, along with Weinberg and Glashow, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979.
The Express Tribune for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)