Higgs boson discovery earns Nobel Prize for original theorists

It's been nearly fifty years since François Englert and Peter Higgs first explained what gives everything in the universe mass, but that amazing piece of work has now earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Although it was teams working at the Large Hadron Collider last summer that actually found the evidence of the Higgs boson, and thus the Higgs field, Englert and Higgs were the first ones to put pen to paper and figure it all out. They proposed that there was a field, completely invisible and (until last year) undetectable, that stretched throughout all of space. Some particles, like photons of light, could just slip through this field without ever touching it. Therefore they have no mass, and thus they travel at the fastest speed there is — the speed of light. Other particles interact with the field and get slowed down by it. If they slow down a little bit, they have a little bit of mass. If they slow down a lot, they have a lot of mass.

This great video gives a fun explanation for how it works (and it condenses it down into only 3 minutes and 20 seconds):

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One thing that should be noted in all this: Englert and Higgs are getting the Nobel Prize this year for being the first to propose that the Higgs field and Higgs particle existed. There were others that were very close behind them in getting papers published about this back then, but they were the first. Without someone doing that theoretical work in the first place, noone would have been looking for it. So, they certainly deserve the recognition for their groundbreaking work that set physics on the path towards last year's discovery.

However, the process of actually discovering that the Higgs particle and field really did exist was done by many, many people, and it took years of hard work to do it. The experiments that provided the work were mentioned in the award, however they don't actually share in it. It certainly makes sense to first honour those that thought it up, so maybe the scientists that did all the amazing work of pushing the universe to reveal its secrets to us will earn next year's Nobel in Physics. Sometimes discoveries are their own reward, but as a message to the Nobel committee, these amazing people deserve some recognition for their work.

(Photo courtesy: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

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