The man behind the Bosons :Dr. Satyendra Nath Bose

Yesterday CERN made an announcement about the results they got from the ATLAS and the CMS experiments conducted at the LHC.They stated that they have found a particle whose mass is in the range of the mass predicted for the Higgs-Boson particle or in common terminology referred to as the "God particle". They haven't confirmed this particle to be the Higgs-Boson particle as its other properties have not been tested so far .

This news caused every particle physicist in the world to jump with joy. The whole day, media was abuzz with stories about the "god particle". Physicists were called on live shows to explain the gravity of this discovery to the common public.

But in all this aren't we forgetting a very important person !!!

Dr. Satyendra Nath Bose, a great Indian Physicist. The word Boson has actually been derived from his surname.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.

Dr. Satyendra Nath Bose

Dr. Bose was a polyglot, he was well versed in many languages including Sanskrit, Bengali, English, French, German and English. Dr. 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.


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.