The release Wednesday of dramatic new data pointing to the
existence of the Higgs boson "God particle" sent a special
flutter of pride, mixed with frustration, through India's
scientific community. The "Higgs" of Higgs boson is well known
to refer to Peter Higgs, the British researcher who in 1964 laid
much of the conceptual groundwork for the presence of the
elusive particle. What is largely unknown, at least to non-
specialists, is that the term "boson" owes its name to the
pioneering work of the late Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath
Bose. Born during British colonial rule in 1894 in Calcutta (now
Kolkata), Bose was a lecturer at both the universities of
Calcutta and Dhaka. In 1924, he sent a paper to Albert Einstein
describing a statistical model that eventually led to the
discovery of what became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate
phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two
fundamental classes of sub-atomic particles -- bosons, named
after Bose, and fermions, after the Italian physicist