''INDIA is like a historic father of the project,'' Paolo Giubellino, CERN spokesperson, said of the Large Hadron Collider built to discover the Higgs boson.
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One hundred and fifty Indian scientists were among the 10,000 working on the CERN project, but the man at the very beginning, from whom the boson got its name, Indian Satyendra Nath Bose, is barely known.
Now, with discovery of a new subatomic particle that is very likely the Higgs boson, India's scientific community is pushing for greater recognition of the Bengali physicist, beginning with the tiny particle's title.
Only the H in Higgs boson is capitalised (after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs) and the name is often shortened to Higgs alone, airbrushing out the Bengali's contribution entirely.
The director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Bose's home town of Calcutta, Milan K. Sanyal, told reporters this week he would write to CERN saying boson, too, should carry a capital.
''Unfortunately, no one seems to care about, at least conveniently forgets, Satyendra Nath Bose,'' the Times of India said over growing speculation about the Higgs boson's existence.
Bose was born in 1894 and was, by contemporary reports, extraordinarily gifted in mathematics. Some of his records set at Presidency College, Calcutta, still stand and he was once awarded 110 out of 100 on a maths exam for solving complex problems by more than one method. He went on to teach and research at universities in Calcutta and Dhaka.
In 1924, he sent a paper to Albert Einstein describing a statistical model that eventually led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper was the basis for naming the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles - bosons and fermions (after Italian Enrico Fermi).
At least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for their work advancing theories Bose postulated. Bose was never so honoured. He died in 1974.
P.M. Bhargava, director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, said Indian scientists were often overlooked internationally. Only one Indian scientist has been awarded the Nobel, others have become Americans and won.
''I believe it is a deliberate omission; this is not the only such case,'' Dr Bhargava said.
But many believe Bose has already won his place in the firmament. ''A Nobel Prize in physics is awarded every year,'' the Indian Broadcasting Network said. ''But nomenclature of an elementary particle lasts till the end of time.''
