SCIENCE \\ More than 50 years ago, Peter Higgs and five other theoretical physicists proposed that an invisible field lying across the Universe gives particles their mass, allowing them to clump together to form stars and planets. Fifty years later the muchelusive God Particle (also known as Higgs boson)—responsible for providing mass to matter’s building blocks—was finally discovered in July 2012. Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, told reporters at a briefing: “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson,” and also added that the, “Discovery is the important word. That is confirmed.” According to scientists it is a 5sigma result which means they are 99.999 per cent sure about the findings of the new particle. The Standard Model, a theory which explains all the particles, forces and interactions that make up the universe, would have proved erroneous without the discovery of this particle. It is the final plug of the Standard Model Theory in Particle Physics. The existence of such a particle was proposed five decades ago in the 1960s by Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh-based physicist, after who the particle has been partly named. But until now pinning down the particle had become an impossible task. The particle which is known to travel faster than light provides mass to matter and makes the elementary particles stick together which otherwise run helterskelter without the mass. To locate the particle the scientists used the Large Hadron Collider to smash protons together at almost the speed of light and cleaned the debris for traces of the particles that sprang into existence for a fraction of a second before disintegration. The God Particle or Higgs boson is partly named after the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. In India the discovery led to an extensive debate on the role of Bose. The debate sprang from the fact that the ‘Higgs’ in the particle is a celebrated name in the scientific circle, but few are aware of the fact that Boson comes from Bose. Born during British colonial rule in 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bose was a lecturer at Calcutta and Dhaka Universities. In 1924, he sent a paper to Albert Einstein describing a statistical model that eventually led to the discovery of what became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two fundamental classes of sub-atomic particles—bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Bose specialised in mathematical physics and was a Fellow at the Royal Society. Yet another point of contention among the Indian scientific community was that while several Nobel prizes have been awarded research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose himself was never honoured by the Nobel academy. However The discovery of the particle has now opened doors to the understanding of the Universe.