The 84-year old Englishman Peter Higgs (left), won the Nobel Prize for Physics along with the 80-year old Francois Englert of Belgium (right), for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles", and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Both the scientists proposed their radical idea in separate research published a few weeks apart in 1964 and it has taken half a century of painstaking experiments to prove their theory correct.
Peter Higgs born on 29 May, 1929 is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh and Francois Englert, born in 6 Nov, 1932 is a Belgium theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University libre de Bruxelles.
Though widely expected, the latest Nobel award is also a controversial one, partly because several other scientists—and CERN itself—can claim significant credit for work done on the Boson. A Nobel Prize can be shared by a maximum of three people and isn't granted posthumously.
Dr. Englert, published his landmark 1964 paper with colleague Robert Brout, who died in 2011. Other strong contenders were three scientists, Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester, Tom Kibble of Imperial College and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University, who published a very similar theory just one month after Dr. Higgs of the U.K. published his paper, which affixed his name to the fabled particle for posterity.
The Nobel Prize in physics is seen as the most prestigious award of its kind, and comes with an 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.25 million) cash award. The winner is appointed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, after a process in which thousands of scientists world-wide are invited to name contenders.
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