Welcoming the Nobel Prize to Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgian Francois Englert for their work on the Higgs Boson - popularly known as the "God particle" - prominent Indian physicists Tuesday asserted that though Indian scientist S.N. Bose did not receive the Nobel, the christening of the particle after him and Higgs is the biggest honour.
Professor Bikash Sinha and Bose Institute director Sibaji Raha here, however, expressed their displeasure at four other researchers missing out on the prize.
Higgs and Englert have shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm Tuesday.
The Nobel was awarded to the two scientists "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider," said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Earlier this year, researchers operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator confirmed that a particle discovered in the experiment is indeed the Higgs Boson, a key element in scientists' theories explaining the makeup of all the matter around us.
"The Boson name is derived from Bose and this is one of our greatest pride...this honour is far beyond any prize. The recognition of Higgs Boson is zero...its been known as Boson world-wide," Sinha said.
Raha said he was not in favour of four other contributors - Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble - not being recognised for their "equally significant" work on the same subject.