Bose and Einstein

By By Alan Saldanha

One of the best ― known analogies to explain how the Higgs Boson mechanism works was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London.

Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like mass less particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson.

The Guardian's Ian Sample demonstrated a variant of this analogy in a 4.5-minute video: Imagine a tray with ping-pong balls scattered on it. The balls roll freely around the empty tray. But then, if you spread a layer of sugar over the tray, the balls sitting on the piled-up sugar don't roll so easily. The grains of sugar introduce a kind of inertial "drag," and that's the kind of effect that the Higgs field supposedly has on particles with mass.

The Daily Times of Pakistan sought to explain the origins of the term Higgs Boson in the following and touches upon the aspect of how “Higgs” cornered the limelight whereas the “Boson” did not.

“The name Higgs boson comes from a mash-up of two names: British physicist Peter Higgs and an Indian scientist, whose underrated accomplishments got a class of particles named after him. Consider the word “Boson” ― it is one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles is named after Satyendra Nath Bose, who preceded Higgs.

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. But his work on quantum mechanics was so substantial that one of the subatomic particles was named after him. However, when science’s biggest find came, Bose was missing from the limelight, even in India.”

The “boson” in the Higgs boson particle, whose search and ultimate detection was one of the longest and most expensive in the history of science, owes its name to Bose. In 1924, the Calcutta-based physicist had sent a paper to Albert Einstein, describing a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

"It's nice to raise a toast to Bose anytime, a scientist past excellence whose contribution to physics is so immense that the discovery of Higgs particle pales in comparison. But it is sad that we are celebrating him on an occasion like this. He is too big a scientist to bask in the reflected glory of a Higgs particle. Bose's theory is fundamental to the subject. Had Higgs particle not existed, it would not have mattered. But without Bose, science would have had to return to the roots," said scientist Subir Sarkar, who was part of the research team at the Geneva-headquartered European Centre for Nuclear Research.

But the crux of the matter is that the Higgs Boson theory has become even more inexplicable considering the complexity of the subject. Not even particle physicists can us a clear cut explanation of the current find. And in any case, it has yet to be confirmed.

This is such a complicated subject that possibly only three men who could have come close to understanding the subject more clearly have all gone to their graves seven to eight decades ago. Two of them: Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize for Physics but the third scientist ― Bose ― was passed over.

But wouldn’t it have been nice if the scientific world were in a more concrete way acknowledge the swashbuckling genius of an Indian Scientist and Mathematician by the name of Satyendra Nath Bose whose name occupies half of the “Higgs Boson.”

The 99.999999 percent “almost proved” discovery of the Higgs Boson particle created ripples in the scientific world though it appears to have died down of late. Particle physicists who enjoyed rock star status for a few months after the Higgs Boson are back to the boredom of awaiting confirmations which might not come in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, we are talking about something that ought to conform to the commonly held notion of particle physics ― the standard model.

But what if it does not?

The writer is the publisher of Daywatch newspaper in Surrey, British Columbia. He can be reached at daywatchnewspaper@gmail.com.