DELHI — Calcutta — or “Kolkata,” as we are now told to spell it — is the most self-consciously intellectual and parochial of Indian cities. Given that Indians in general live with a belief, often unsupported by empirical evidence, in their intellectual superiority, the subject of Bengali geniuses can be especially touchy.
On July 4, CERN, the European council for nuclear research, announced the possible discovery of the Higgs boson based on observations at the Large Hadron Collider. The next day, Milan K. Sanyal, the director of the prestigious Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Calcutta, told reporters he would write to CERN to say that the “boson” in “Higgs boson” should also carry a capital letter. The demand, made with a straight face, was based on the fact that the term honors the work of the Calcutta-based, Indian Bengali physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.
There are only two types of elementary particles: bosons and fermions (whose name also is not capped despite being named after the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi). The principal difference between them is that fermions of the same energy cannot exist in the same quantum state, whereas bosons can. This property of bosons explains lasers and superfluidity, a state of matter that behaves like a fluid with no internal resistance. Particles such as quarks, electrons and neutrinos are fermions; the boson category includes photons and gluons, as well as the W, the Z and the Higgs particles.
Bose’s work described the properties defining the entire class of bosons, but Higgs and other physicists had predicted the existence of a particular kind of boson to explain the presence of mass in elementary particles. The CERN discovery, in other words, is more about the work of physicists like Higgs than Bose. And given the lack of standards for naming elementary particles, these could well have been named without invoking Bose at all.
Yet there’s been no shortage of news articles and opinion pieces in Indian papers complaining about the injustice done to Bose.
The Britain-based Indian Bengali writer Amit Chaudhuri argued in The Guardian in July that it would be easier for most people to understand the significance of the Higgs boson’s discovery if it were located “in personalities as well as cultural and national traditions.” This might sound like an innocuous observation about what it takes to popularize complicated science, but it isn’t — not if you consider how in the same op-ed Chaudhari bemoans that Indian scientists never get their fair share. “Western science is pristine,” he claims, “and bears no mark of what’s outside itself.”
The Indian government even issued a release stating, “For India God Particle is as much Boson as Higgs.”
Speaking at a conference in Calcutta earlier this month, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director-general of CERN, handled these sensitivities deftly. “I was asked yesterday why the boson was not capped. In Bose’s own city today, we have capped the Boson. I, in fact, always cap the Boson. But today, we changed all our CERN slides to cap Bosons.” Circumstances had left him with little choice but to pander, with as much grace as possible, to the insecurities of his hosts.
Paradoxically, Bose himself seemed “least concerned about rankings and prizes,” according to the political scientist Ashis Nandy, who interviewed the scientist before his death in 1974. Calling India, and “all post-colonial societies,” “touchy,” Nandy advised, “The sooner we get out of that, the better.”
Chaudhuri and those who feel pricked by Western slights should pay heed. Calcutta, and India in general, could do with more good science, less cultural breast-beating and the occasional ability to laugh at oneself.