The 'boson' in the Higgs boson particle, whose investigation and ultimate detection still being celebrated around the world, and rightly so, has been one of the longest and most expensive research projects in the history of science. Boson owes its name to Bengali Professor Satyendra Nath Bose who in 1924, unable to get his paper published on the subject sent it to Albert Einstein for publication .Einstein liked the paper , translated it into German and got it published in Zeitschrift für Physik along with his own related paper .Bose had earlier translated Einstein's Theory of relativity into Bengali .
Prof Bose 's paper described a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon and laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
The discovery will help understand as to what happened just after the Big Bang aka creation of the Universe? Why did matter dominate over anti-matter, when, in laboratory settings, they are created in equal amounts? This is a fascinating world of speculation, hypothesis and theory lubricated mostly by intuitive imagination and higher mathematics and then confirmed by experiments. Further research and work will increase understanding not only about our minor planet earth in our vast galaxy but will also be another step to understand zillions of galaxies some millions of light years away and human matter and perhaps human mind itself . Just see how puny vain human being is.
But our fragile planet earth is now threatened by the US led west determined to hang on to their power of destruction ,domination and exploitation of the rest of the world .In India there are many specially English knowing ignorant and educated in their schools and universities , who accept and have internalized the superiority of the uncivilized West , who themselves derived their powers of destruction from the knowledge discovered and developed in the East led by the many civilizations in Mesopotamia , which now lies destroyed , debased and contaminated by nuclear poisons . How would have civilizations been advanced through new technologies without Zero and the Arabic Numerals, which the Arabs call Hindsa i.e. from Hind i.e. India!
The coverage of the results of this successful experiment at the European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) by ignorant Indian corporate media, which obediently repeated western wire news stories, showed it obsession with trivialities and celebrities and parroting the west. Little background was given about Bose and his life .West as usual overlooked Bose and flaunted and gushed over the messenger Professor Peter Higgs of the Edinburgh University.
And perhaps this was the reason in 1920s when in spite of this path breaking epic formulation by Bose , not only was he denied a Nobel prize but not even conferred a doctorate , although since then a few Nobel prizes have gone to those who worked on Bose' theory .The fault is not entirely of the ruling British , who wanted to keep the natives down as they still regularly endeavor against India's strategic and vital interests ,but infects most info-challenged and white color inferiority complexed Indians ( original sin by fairer colored Brahmins , which the British accentuated and still persists ) Indians continue to exhibit this in obnoxious ads for creams for crass nouveaux riches by Bollywood witless jokers...
More on Satyen Bose & his visit to Cairo in 1963, where the author was then posted, at the end....
Higgs Bosons or God's Particles Simplified.
The term God particle was coined by American experimental physicist and Physics Nobel winner Leon Lederman in his popular science book on particle physics:
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
According to Higgs, it wasn't Lederman's choice to call it the god particle: "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him."
Why chase it?
Simply put, it answers the question: How does nature decide whether or not to assign mass to particles?
How did the idea of tracing the God particle originate?
The Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to vector bosons, was theorized in August 1964 by François Englert and Robert Brout ("boson scalaire"), in October of the same year by Peter Higgs, working from the ideas of Philip Anderson, and independently by G S Guralnik, C R Hagen, and T W B Kibble who worked out the results by the spring of 1963.
The three papers written by Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Higgs, Brout, and Englert were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration.
Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the electroweak symmetry breaking. The electroweak theory predicts a neutral particle whose mass is not far from that of the W and Z bosons
What questions are being answered by this Endeavour?
Click to comprehend BIG BANG expansion; 13.7 billion years (I hope the URL can be used to view the fascinating Big Bang Expansion).
Finally how little we know of our universe and ourselves but are determined and far advanced into bringing everything to an early explosive end triggered say by West's current and unreasonable and illegal demands on Iran and elsewhere.)
By exploring the world of infinitely small particles, physicists hope to provide answers to the origin and fate of our universe.
What happened just after the Big Bang? Why did matter dominate over anti-matter when, in laboratory settings, they are created in equal amounts?
What would you say if you found out we do not live in a four-dimensional world (three dimensions of space and one of time), but rather one containing extra hidden dimensions?
There are enough strange, puzzling questions and even stranger possible answers to blow your mind!
Does Higgs boson impact the current description we use for the universe?
The Higgs boson will complete our description of the visible matter in the universe, and of the fundamental processes governing the Big Bang since it was a trillionth of a second old.
The Higgs boson may have played a role in generating the matter in the universe, and may be linked to dark matter. It may even provide a clue how the universe inflated to its present size.
On the other hand, the Higgs boson is a very different particle from the others we know, and poses almost as many questions as it answers. For example, what determines the mass of the Higgs boson and the density of dark energy? According to conventional ideas, both should be much larger than their observed values. The quest continues.
Has Boson been proved!
Built in a tunnel 100 meters (325 feet) below ground at the European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) straddling the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom-smasher, was designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together replicating conditions which prevailed in split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Conceptualized around a quarter century back, approved for construction in the mid-1990s and over a decade in the making, this technological marvel of a machine accelerated counter rotating beams of protons in two steel pipes 27 kilometers in circumference.
Engineers threw the switch to start up the LHC in September 2008 to global fanfare. All went well until it had to be shut down again 36 hours later. The incident -- which led to a helium leak into the tunnel housing the superconductor ring -- is thought to have been caused when a faulty electrical wire between two magnets was melted by the high current passing through it.
Repairs and a new safety system cost them a bomb. The LHC was restarted in November 2009 and became the most powerful particle accelerator in the world later that month.
In December 2010, LHC scientists revealed they had caught a first tantalizing glimpse of the particle. Since the initial excitement the scientists sifted through vast quantities of data from innumerable high energy collisions in an effort to reduce the chances of being wrong.
How was the data from LHC analyzed?
A theoretical model was used to predict what phenomena and particles might be seen, and experimental physicists estimated what their detector response would be to such events, using complex simulation methods.
They did this first so that they could predict the various expected types of events that will come out of the LHC. These simulated events looked just like the events collected in the detectors, except they are generated using all our knowledge of what can be produced when protons collide in the LHC.
Then the experimentalists determined a series of criteria for selecting new physics, partly defined using simulations. The selection criteria were designed for the sole purpose of spotting a needle in a field full of haystacks.
For this, physicists studied in detail the characteristics of possible interesting events (such as the Higgs boson), comparing these characteristics with those of known processes.
At this stage, the name of the game was to isolate the signal from all other types of events, which physicists referred to as background. Most of the time, the background constitutes the bulk of all collected events.
The final step was to compare the simulations of the known processes that survive the selection criteria to the collected data set. In some cases, comparison with simulations might not be necessary, and physicists may just need to subtract potential Higgs signals from the background directly inferred from the actual data.
What next?
The data recorded so far in 2012 have not been completely analyzed, and the LHC is still taking data. Further analysis is needed and ongoing.
Despite the strong evidence for its existence, the properties of the Higgs boson need to be explored and understood. As the particle is identified and studied more completely, the physics models will have to be updated.
But doesn't it mean that the July 4 revelation is not exactly a discovery?
The results presented on July 4 have been labeled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. A more complete picture of Wednesday's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.
The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe.
Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic?
The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4 percent of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96 percent of the universe that remains obscure.
Bosons of Satyendra Nath Bose...
In particle physics, Boson is a subatomic particle that is governed by Bose-Einstein statistics. Bosons include mesons (e.g., pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number (e.g., helium-4), and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (e.g., photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions in that there is no limit to the number that can occupy the same quantum state.
Bose wrote a short article called Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta taking for the first time the position that the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant.
Bose 's paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics and using a novel way of counting states with identical particles was seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics. Albert Einstein to whom this article was sent in Germany, recognizing the importance of the paper, translated it into German himself and submitted it on behalf of Bose to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik , which was published in 1924 along with his paper supporting Bose's paper.
This theory is now called Bose–Einstein statistics and laid the foundation of quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Dirac. Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.
Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates—Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize. The noted Indian physicist Jayant Narlikar observed that it was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class.
Meeting with Satyendra Nath Bose
As an Arabic language trainee and later as Asst Press Attaché at the Indian Embassy in Cairo in early 1960s , airport duties to handle visiting VIPs and delegations and taking them around for meetings and museums etc could be quite often a very pleasant and educationally a rewarding experience .
During the heyday of close and very friendly relations between India and Egypt which along with Yugoslavia, Indonesia and others were the leaders of the non-aligned movement, the author met with Satyendra Nath Bose, a member of a visiting scientific delegation from India. Bose was not the leader of the delegation but this nearly seventy year old gangly and casually dressed inquisitive scientist Satyen Bose was the one whom his counterpart Egyptian scientists paid great attention and respect .It was said that he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics.
Bose and later Homi J Bhaba, another great scientist were also curious and very well informed about Egypt's history and culture unlike the dry and morose Indian ambassador .
Bhaba looking at the massive Pharaonic sculptors and millions of huge stones brought to build the Giza Pyramids near Cairo (oldest built around 2560 BC) from Aswan, 600 miles away, observed that to bring them the ancient Egyptians perhaps tied the boats over the stones and then floated them down the river Nile, to carry them .It can be thus said that the Egyptians discovered much earlier the Archimedes' principle. It is a law of physics stating that the upward force (buoyancy) exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the amount of fluid the body displaces. In other words, an immersed object is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it actually displaces. Archimedes' principle is an important and underlying concept in the field of fluid mechanics. This principle is named after its discoverer, Archimedes of Syracuse (287 BC – c. 212 BC)
Eureka!
K Gajendra Singh. ( July, 2012 ) Mayur Vihar, Delhi.
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