Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Bosons––poem by Dorothy
Bosons
Satyendra Nath Bose, born l894 in British Calcutta,
was an ordinary looking man. He could have been
a shopkeeper
dispensing sweets,
or worked for the railroads as a clerk or under engineer, the way his father did.
Even his eyes do not yield his secret,
his hidden seeing.
Without a Ph. D., he entered
the world of science and came up
with conclusions startling for their novelty.
At first his ideas
were derided,
his notions of skewed statistics seen as absurd
(everyone knows that if you
flip a coin, one side
is bound to come up
exactly fifty percent of the time,
not two-thirds as he claimed
for the subatomic realm). Predictably,
the journals turned him down,
and not until Einstein lent his name to the discovery
did he see print for
his mind boggling notion (later further verified through Heisenbergʼs uncertainly principle.)
His approach was later known by both their names, Bose-Einstein statistics.
In physics, he is remembered
as the namesake of “bosons,” indescribably minute subatomic particles which exist at the quantum level
and are hard to pin down.
Many made reputations for
research based
on his findings,
but he never was given
the Nobel Prize,
though his now is ranked
among the most
significant scientific contributions
of our time.
The most famous boson
is the God particle,
the one that will explain everything,
the one we were still looking for
until recently
and now claim to have found.
Dorothy Walters
