: Satyendra Nath Bose in 1925.
With the announcement of the latest findings in the search for
the Higgs boson, the elusive particle is on everyone’s mind. This kind
of fame is relatively rare, even for important scientific discoveries;
but the Higgs boson has been called, or miscalled, the God particle,
enabling it to pass into the realm of popular scientific lore, like the
discovery of the smallpox vaccine, the structure of DNA, or the theory
of relativity.
It would be difficult for most people to understand its significance,
just as it would be to comprehend the notion of relativity, but such
problems are overcome by locating science in personalities as well as
cultural and national traditions. The first thing that you and I know
about the Higgs boson is that it’s named after Peter Higgs, a physicist
at Edinburgh University who made the discovery — although the original
insight, in one of those recurrent back stories of science, was Philip
Anderson’s.
Still, we have Higgs, and Edinburgh, and western civilisation to fall
back on. The rest — “the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary
particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs
to a class of particles known as bosons ...” — we needn’t worry too
much about. But maybe we should worry just enough to ask, “What is a
boson?” since the word tends to come up as soon as Higgs does. Is it, an
ignoramus such myself would ask, akin to an atom or a molecule? It is,
in fact, along with the fermion (named after Enrico Fermi), one of the
two fundamental classes of subatomic particles.
From Bose
The word must surely have some European genealogy? In fact, “boson” is
derived from Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata who,
in 1924, realised that the statistical method used to analyse most
19th-century work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate. He
first sent off a paper on quantum statistics to a British journal, which
turned it down. He then sent it to Albert Einstein, who immediately
grasped its immense importance, and published it in a German journal.
Bose’s innovation came to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics, and
became a basis of quantum mechanics. Einstein saw that it had profound
implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic
particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, “boson.”
Still, science and the West are largely synonymous and coeval: they are
words that have the same far-reaching meaning. Just as Van Gogh and
Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings digest the Japanese prints they were
responding to so we don’t need to be aware of Japanese prints when
viewing the post-impressionists, western science is pristine, and bears
no mark of what’s outside itself.
Other Indian contributions
The last Indian scientific discovery that is universally acknowledged is
the zero. Indians are very strong at maths, and the only modern Indian
who’s remotely part of the western mythology of science is Srinivasa
Ramanujan, equally well known for his Hindu idiosyncrasies and his
agonised stay in Cambridge as he is for his mathematical genius.
Indians can be excellent geeks, as demonstrated by the tongue-tied
astrophysicist Raj Koothrappalli in the U.S. sitcom Big Bang Theory; but
the Nobel prize can only be aspired to by Sheldon Cooper, the
super-geek and genius in the series, for whom Raj’s country of origin is
a diverting enigma, and miles away from the popular myth of science on
which Big Bang Theory is dependent. Bose didn’t get the Nobel Prize; nor
did his contemporary and namesake, J.C. Bose, whose contribution to the
fashioning of the wireless predates Marconi’s. The only Indian
scientist to get a Nobel Prize is the physicist C.V. Raman, for his work
on light at Kolkata University. Other Indians have had to become
Americans to get the award.
Conditions have always been inimical to science in India, from colonial
times to the present day; and despite that, its contributions have
occasionally been huge. Yet non-western science (an ugly label
engendered by the exclusive nature of western popular imagination) is
yet to find its Rosalind Franklin, its symbol of paradoxical success.
Unlike Franklin, however, these scientists were never in a race that
they lost; they simply came from another planet.