India, May 2 -- When Jainendra Jain was 12, he had a favourite story.

It was the one about Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein and a new theory on photon behaviour. "It was absolutely amazing to me that someone could, just from pure thought, sitting alone at the University of Dhaka, come up with something as fundamental as the concept of bosons, and send ripples through the world," Jain says.

That story marked the start of his love affair with physics. Jain is now 65 and a condensed-matter physicist at Pennsylvania State University. He recently won the 2025 Wolf Prize (considered second only to the Nobel), for his discovery of a new kind of particle, called the composite fermion.

This particle has immense implications for quantum computing; ...