Satyendra Nath Bose deserved Nobel: CERN chief

Director General of CERN (The European Organisation for Nuclear Research) Rolf-Dieter Heuer on Monday said that it is unfortunate that Prof. Satyendra Nath Bose was not given a Nobel Award for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons or particles with spin named after Bose.

“He has certainly contributed to our understanding of particle physics on the level of other Nobel Prize winners. But, it in no way undermines his stature as one of the leading physicists the world has had”, Heuer said.

Talking to reporters after delivering a public lecture on Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Calcutta University Centenary Auditorium, Heuer said that he feels pain as whenever he thinks that Prof. Bose is not a Nobel laureate. However, the only refuge he finds is that there were several personalities who made significant contributions to science, but remained deprived of the award and Prof. Bose was one of them.

He stated that one of the two families of particles is called ‘Bosons’ as “Satyendranath Bose has done a lot of work. His contribution is immense. We do not give names to particles or families of particles if somebody has not done fantastic work.”