Sharma, who did his schooling in Kendriya Vidyalaya, Pune, in Maharashtra, and Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, says he was drawn to Experimental Particle Physics after learning Rig Veda hymns from his mother, a Sanskrit scholar. The ancient text has a hymn on creation that speculates on the origin of the universe and describes a period when “all that existed was void and formless”.

Sharma, is actually Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and divides his time between the two places.

“It was a shock, it left an impression in my mind. Thousands of years ago people were contemplating our origins,” Sharma, was quoted as saying sometimes back.

He was still a high school student but began thinking how modern technology might be used to probe creation. The Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that Sharma and his colleagues are looking for, was predicted in the 1960s to explain the origin of mass.

A discovery of the Higgs boson is important for Physicists because it is the last missing, or unseen, piece of a bedrock theory of Physics called the Standard Model that explains all the forces and particles in nature except gravity.

Sharma moved to the US in 1984, treating higher studies in the US as a route to plunge into Experimental Physics requiring expensive machines––particle accelerators — but spent five years at CERN in the early 1990s where he discovered two new subatomic particles, including a cousin of the proton, but five times heavier.

Sharma, who spends eight weeks at CERN and 10 to 15 days with his wife and eight year-old daughter in San Diego, is also keen on drawing more students to Physics.