Peter Higgs of Boson Fame Shares Nobel Prize in Physics

"Peter Higgs and Francois Englert have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory of how particles acquire mass, the Swedish committee announced Tuesday."

"The prize was given '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.'"

"In 1964, Higgs of Britain and Englert of Belgium (along with a now-deceased colleague), independently proposed a particle as part of a mechanism to explain how the universe works at its most basic level. The existence of that particle, known today as the Higgs boson, or Higgs particle (and sometimes the 'God particle'), was confirmed after a series of high-energy collisions at the LHC."