Despite India's many contributions, science remains largely synonymous with the West.

WITH today's announcement of the latest findings in the search for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle is on everyone's mind. This kind of fame is relatively rare, even for important scientific discoveries; but the Higgs boson has been called, or miscalled, the ''God particle'', enabling it to pass into the realm of popular scientific lore, like the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, the structure of DNA, or the theory of relativity.

It would be difficult for most people to understand its significance, just as it would be to comprehend the notion of relativity, but such problems are overcome by locating science in personalities as well as cultural and national traditions. The first thing that you and I know about the Higgs boson is that it's named after Peter Higgs, a physicist at Edinburgh University who made the discovery - although the original insight, in one of those recurrent back stories of science, was Philip Anderson's.

Still, we have Higgs, and Edinburgh, and Western civilisation to fall back on. The rest - ''the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons …'' - we needn't worry too much about. But maybe we should worry just enough to ask, ''What is a boson?'', since the word tends to come up as soon as Higgs does. Is it, an ignoramus such as myself would ask, akin to an atom or a molecule? It is, in fact, along with the fermion (named after Enrico Fermi), one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles.

The word must surely have some European genealogy? In fact, ''boson'' is derived from Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata who, in 1924, realised that the statistical method used to analyse most 19th-century work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate. He first sent off a paper on quantum statistics to a British journal, which turned it down. He then sent it to Albert Einstein, who immediately grasped its immense importance, and published it in a German journal. Bose's innovation came to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics, and became a basis of quantum mechanics. Einstein saw that it had profound implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, ''boson''.