Englert & Higgs win!

[Snowboarder_Bo]

WOOT! Good job, Nobel Prize Committee! Way to go Englert & Higgs!

[

Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of Britain won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their theory on how the most basic building blocks of the universe acquire mass, eventually forming the world we know today.

Their concept was confirmed last year by the discovery of the so-called Higgs particle, also known as the Higgs boson, at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy,” the 84-year-old Higgs said in a statement released by the University of Edinburgh, where he is a professor emeritus. “I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.”

](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NOBEL_PHYSICS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-10-08-08-59-23)

[tim314]

It’s worth noting that this is a somewhat controversial decision. Not the fact that Englert and Higgs won, but for who was left out. Really the Higgs mechanism was developed independently by three groups:

• Englert and Brout (who died in 2011, or he would surely have received a share of the award
• Higgs, working alone
  and
• Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble

The latter group made it to publication just a little bit later in the same year, and because physics prize is limited to at most three recipients, they miss out. (There was some speculation that maybe only one of the three would be included, but that didn’t happen.)

[Tante_Dillie]

• Englert and Brout (who died in 2011, or he would surely have received a share of the award
• Higgs, working alone
  and
• Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble

They’re boson buddies.

[OldGuy]

@tim314

The latter group made it to publication just a little bit later in the same year, and because physics prize is limited to at most three recipients, they miss out. (There was some speculation that maybe only one of the three would be included, but that didn’t happen.)

I don’t really understand this. Since CERN was also proposed as a recipient, and even inf you only count those at CERN looking explicitly for the Higgs, there were many more than three, why couldn’t the “three” recipients have been the three groups. In any case I suspect something will be done to modify that rule because it hardly seems compatible with the way a lot of physics research is done these days.

[tim314]

So far as I know it’s essentially a made-up rule anyway, but one that they’ve always stuck with. Awarding it to CERN would also have been breaking the precedent, as the Physics prize has only ever been given to individuals (unlike the Peace prize). But yeah, it doesn’t really make much sense.