Higgs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics
The “God particle” became the Prize particle on Tuesday.
Why Is the Higgs, the ‘Higgs’?Multimedia
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Times Topic: Higgs Boson
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Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Peter Higgs, right, and François Englert at a conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2012.
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"An astounding scientific achievement by two dedicated researchers. Explaining their breakthrough for all to understand is the challenge. "Pancha Chandra, Brussels, Belgium
Two theoretical physicists who suggested that an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space is responsible for the mass and diversity of the particles in the universe won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning. They are Peter Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and François Englert, 80, of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
The theory, elucidated in 1964, sent physicists on a generation-long search for a telltale particle known as the Higgs boson, or the God particle. The chase culminated in July 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland.
Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert will split a prize of $1.2 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Dr. Higgs, he said, is a modest man, who likes his own company and the ability to come and go without a fuss. He suspect, Dr. Walker added, that this is not going to be the case. Even before the announcement, he said, one
But it came with a dose of disappointment for some. The notion of this energy ocean, now known as the Higgs field, arose in three papers published independently in 1964.
The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, and traditionally no more than three people have been permitted to share a single prize.
R. Sekhar Chivukula, a Michigan State professor who chaired a committee that awarded the American Physical Society’s prestigious Sakurai prize to all six of the theorists in 2010, called the failure by the Nobel committee to recognize the work of Drs. Kibble, Hagen and Guralnik “a significant oversight.”
Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas, Austin, who won a Nobel Prize in 1979 by making the Higgs boson the centerpiece of a theory that united two of the basic forces of nature (electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force), said he was enthusiastic about the award, saying the citation had gotten things exactly right, but added, “I think it’s a pity” that Drs. Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble had not been represented.
The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of that theory, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up. According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial.
Without the Higgs field, all elementary particles would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us.
As Dr. Higgs once told The Guardian newspaper: “It has consequences. If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here.”
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