Satyendra Nath Bose, the God Particle Genius

One snowy December evening in 1933, two physicists stood beneath the sparkling lights of Stockholm Concert Hall to accept the world’s most coveted scientific honor: the Nobel Prize. King Gustaf V of Sweden presented the medals along with a cash prize of 20,000 Swedish kronor — roughly $1 million today. Cameras flashed. The audience, composed of dignitaries, royals, and other scientists, erupted in applause. To the world, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger had changed physics by discovering “new productive forms of atomic theory.” 

But one name was conspicuously absent: not mentioned, not invited, and not celebrated. Thousands of miles away, a Bengali physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose toiled away quietly, working as a middle-class physics professor at Dhaka University. To this day, few outside his country know his name — or how he changed the course of physics altogether.