In 1924, a young lecturer at the University of Dhaka sat staring at a rejection letter. His paper on the statistics of photons — a radical new way to derive Planck's radiation law without classical physics — had been turned down by the Philosophical Magazine. The reviewers didn't understand it. To most physicists of the day, the approach seemed like a mathematical error. But Bose knew he was right. He could feel the elegance of the derivation, the way it treated photons as truly indistinguishable particles for the first time in history. So he did something audacious: he packaged up his paper and mailed it directly to Albert Einstein in Berlin, with a short, almost painfully humble cover letter asking if Einstein might arrange for its publication. Einstein read the paper and immediately recognized its brilliance. He translated it into German himself and submitted it to Zeitschrift fur Physik, adding a note that Bose's work represented 'an important advance.' Einstein then extended Bose's method to atoms, giving birth to Bose-Einstein statistics and predicting an entirely new state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate, finally created in a lab seventy years later. The entire class of particles that obey these statistics — photons, gluons, the Higgs boson — are called bosons, named after the man from Dhaka who refused to let a rejection letter be the final word.