Whose particle is it anyway?

“Never marry the woman of your dreams
Dreams, baby, are not all they seems...”
From Bhangbole
by Bachchoo

The news, the big news, the news beyond all the petty strictures and claims around the Olympics in London; the news beyond the fall of markets in Spain; the concerns further than the revival of the political fortunes of bunga-bunga Berlusconi are the ones emanating from Switzerland.
No, it’s not bankrupt and neither has some maniac gone out with a machine gun and shot 79 strangers in a picnic park, ski resort or cinema. It’s the news that the world’s scientists, engaged in the most expensive experiment known to history, have discovered at their laboratory at CERN the particle that makes, they say, the contemporary theory of reality complete and true.
They have, these scientists claim, discovered the particle that makes the model of the physical universe complete. Some people call it the God Particle. The man who actually postulated such a particle, originated the idea and consequently the quest for it, Prof. Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, says that calling it that was a joke and it should not be taken seriously.
For now, the particle remains “the Higgs-boson”. It may, as the discovery at CERN gets classified and enters the intricacies of contemporary physics notation, be called something else. Certainly the name
of Higgs will be attached to it.
But what of the “boson” bit?
When the experiment at CERN came to a decisive and happy conclusion, their chief called Mr Higgs, who was somewhere in North Africa at the time, and said he should make his way to Switzerland or he would regret it very much. He meant that they would celebrate success, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle as they announced it to the world, with cracking open bottles of champagne.
I think they did. And here’s a toast to progressive discovery!
But did the champagne corks pop in Kolkata? After all the particle is not just a Higgs thing; it’s a Higgs boson thing.
So why is there a “boson” appended to the phenomenon and why is “boson” without a capital letter when Higgs is?
As a sometime student of physics (It’s true, yaar, I did a B.Sc. And even won a graduation silver medal from Pune University and then did a physics degree, though they called it “Natural Sciences” at Cambridge) I always nationalistically thought of this Higgs boson particle, of which I knew very little as the joint speculative work of Mr Higgs and of an Indian theoretical physicist named S.N. Bose who had, I knew, collaborated with Albert Einstein on particle physics on experiments concerning very low temperatures.
So when the Higgs boson particle became a central item of news 40 years after my engagements with theoretical physics I assumed that two great minds would be rewarded with the satisfaction of knowing that they had put a
crucial piece into the building jigsaw of the universe.
I also initially thought that the relegation of “boson” to an appendage without a capital letter was pure racist Europeanism. I thought long and deep about it — this stealing of the limelight from our dear Bengali genius. Then recently one night I woke up from a dream in which I had seen that Marks & Spencer, the famous British retailers of groceries and clothing, were very often referred to as “Marks”. Mr Spencer had, in popular parlance, been dispensed with.
I thought back to my smoking days. A cigarette which was manufactured by Messrs Benson and Hedges was always known to us as “a packet of Bensons”. Mr Hedges was never mentioned.
Which led to thoughts of my Cambridge days where there was a college called Gonville and Caius, which was always ever called “Caius’” — and that too, to confuse the public further, pronounced “Keys”.
So had Bose found company with Spencer, Hedges and Gonville? Or was there some other explanation, apart from the fact that Bose had been dead for at least half a century, for Higgs to grab the limelight? In patriotic mode I determined to look into it. I discovered, of course, that Bose had not collaborated with Mr Higgs and that he died in 1974. How we get our eras mixed!
I discovered also that Bose had indeed given his name to the “boson”, but this was a general term applied to an indistinguishable particle in the early days of particle theory. The name persisted as a generic name for particles yet to be discovered.
Mr Higgs, way back in 1964, postulated the qualities and mathematical attributes and limits of the “boson” that would fit into the “standard model” and, if it could be proved that it existed, would give credence to the model. What’s the model? It’s an abstruse mathematical construction that contemporary physicists have arrived at as giving us a mathematical — but certainly not a conceptual — construction of the nature of matter, energy, gravitation, forces, fields... reality.
Nothing that Mr Higgs postulates is directly based on anything that Bose did. It still remains true that without the work Bose did in theoretical physics, Mr Higgs may never have got to being able to pin down the required characteristics of his particle. But that remains true of Einstein, Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie and 50 others and they can’t all be named as the postulants of the Higgs boson particle.
So India and the champagne salesmen of Kolkata cannot legitimately celebrate this great breakthrough in theoretical physics. Nevertheless, Satyendra Nath Bose, who discovered a fundamental law of quantum physics and who was afforded the accolade by none other than the distinguished physicist Paul Dirac of having a general species of particle named after him, is distinct enough as a world scientist.
When Mr Higgs gets the Nobel Prize he may or may not mention the person who gives his particle its full name. There may be indignation in the scientific clubs of Kolkata (are there any?), but India as a nation shouldn’t share it.