Highest level of talent not recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee.

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The world is agog with excitement about the possible discovery of something called the Higgs boson or the God Particle in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. But no one knows the name of one of India’s greatest sons who is no longer with us but is still associated with this global excitement. He was none other than Satyendra Nath Bose, a mathematician and physicist, who won worldwide fame for his association with the great Albert Einstein in developing a theory of the particle like qualities of light. His pioneering work on the quantum theory of light was hailed by Einstein, who lost no time in extending it to gases during 1924-1925 and provided the foundation for Bose- Einstein or simply Bose Statistics and the theory of Bose- Einstein Condensates, a new state of matter in which thousands of atoms condense into a single giant atom that behaves like a wave. Particles that follow Bose’s Statistics have been named ‘boson’ in his honour. There is only one other family of particles in the universe that follows a slightly different statistics and are called fermions after the Italian Nobel laureate, Enrico Fermi. Although the Nobel Prize has been awarded more than once for research related to concepts such as the boson, Bose- Einstein Statistics and Bose- Einstein Condensates, Bose himself was ignored by the Nobel committee, presumably because there was no political support for him. J.Bardeen,L.N.Cooper and J.R.Schrieffer got the Nobel Prize in 1957 for their theory of superconductivity which was based on Bose- Einstein Condensates. The next Nobel based on Bose’s idea went to D.M.Lee, D.D.Osheroff and R.C.Richardson in 1996 for their theory of super-fluidity, which was, again based on the strange property of Bose- Einstein Condensates to flow through fine capillary tubes without any viscous drag. Next in line were E.A.Cornell, W.Ketterle and C.E.Wieman in 2001 for their direct observation of Bose- Einstein Condensates in alkaline gases. And now, of course, Peter Higgs in Edinburgh is waiting in the wings to snatch the prize for his idea that only a special type of ‘boson’ can do the job of giving mass to elementary particles and making it possible for the universe to come into being. There is no other idea that has been so profoundly influential across all branches of science. Is it not unfortunate on part of the Nobel committee that they could not recognize the masterly talent of an Indian scientist by crowning him with the Nobel Prize and proved again that it is not a neutral platform assessing the highest level of contribution in the field of consideration for which it was originally established?