On July 4 2012 scientists at CERN in Geneva announced one of the most significant discoveries in the history of physics.After a quest spanning nearly half a century, physicists had found the Higgs boson. The God Particle. The particle believed to give all other particles their mass. The particle without which there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no stars, no planets and no people. Rousing cheers and a standing ovation broke out as CERN Director General Rolf Heuer declared they had reached a milestone in their understanding of nature.The world's newspapers celebrated Peter Higgs, the British physicist who had theorised the particle's existence in 1964.Almost nobody mentioned the other name in the particle's full title.The Higgs boson. Two names. Peter Higgs. And Bose.Bose is Satyendra Nath Bose. Born in Kolkata in 1894. Student at Presidency College on College Street, where he sat in the same classroom as Meghnad Saha and was taught by Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Professor at Dhaka University in 1924, where he wrote a paper that the British Philosophical Magazine rejected without much thought.So he sent it to Einstein instead.The letter he sent began with the words Respected Sir, I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. Einstein replied on a postcard dated July 2 1924 saying he had translated the paper himself and submitted it to Zeitschrift fur Physik, the leading physics journal in the world, and that it signifies an important step forward and pleases me very much.Imagine being so good at physics that the man who invented relativity becomes your personal translator.Einstein then extended Bose's work to atoms and predicted a new state of matter, what we now call a Bose-Einstein condensate. Every particle that follows Bose's statistical framework is called a boson. The photon is a boson. The gluon is a boson. The W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force. And the Higgs boson, the God Particle itself, is a boson.The God Particle India gave the world is embedded permanently in the name of the most important physics discovery of the 21st century.And Bose never won the Nobel Prize.This episode tells the complete story of Satyendra Nath Bose, the God Particle, and why a rejected paper sent from colonial India to a famous physicist in Berlin in 1924 made the Large Hadron Collider's greatest discovery possible.What You Will Discover in This EpisodeThe complete story of Satyendra Nath Bose, born in Kolkata in 1894, who studied at Presidency College alongside Meghnad Saha and was taught by Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray, two of the most consequential scientists in the history of Indian physicsHow Bose, while preparing a lecture on Planck's law of blackbody radiation at Dhaka University in 1923, became dissatisfied with existing derivations that smuggled in classical physics assumptions, and developed a completely new way to count identical quantum particles based on the realisation that photons are fundamentally indistinguishable from each otherWhy Bose's paper was rejected by the British Philosophical Magazine in late 1923, and what combination of self-confidence and intellectual courage led him to send it directly to Albert Einstein in Berlin with a letter asking Einstein to translate it and submit it for publication if he found it worthwhileThe precise content of Einstein's postcard reply dated July 2 1924, in which he confirmed he had translated the paper himself and submitted it to Zeitschrift fur Physik, calling it an important step forward that pleased him very much, making Einstein the personal translator of a paper that had been turned down by British journalsWhat Bose-Einstein statistics actually is, why the insight that identical quantum particles are fundamentally indistinguishable and can crowd into the same state is one of the deepest conceptual breakthroughs in all of quantum physics, and how Einstein extended Bose's framework from photons to atoms to predict the Bose-Einstein condensate, a new fifth state of matterThe complete division of all particles in the universe into bosons and fermions, what this fundamental division means, and why the Higgs boson being a boson means the God Particle belongs to the class of particles named after a Kolkata physicistWhy lasers, MRI machines, superconductors, GPS atomic clocks and quantum computers all exist because of Bose-Einstein statistics, making Bose's rejected 1924 manuscript one of the most consequential pieces of physics ever written in terms of its everyday technological applicationsThe story of the Higgs boson itself, what the Higgs field is, why particles acquire their mass through it, why Peter Higgs theorised its existence in 1964 and why finding experimental proof of it required building the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider beneath the French-Swiss borderWhy Satyendra Nath Bose was never awarded the Nobel Prize despite the foundational importance of ...
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