Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/

by mattheww • 13 years ago

329 83 13 years ago

r0muald2• 13 years ago

Apparently most commentators were expecting it. I wonder if there was a possibility that also the CERN team could be awarded the prize?

peterjancelis• 13 years ago

I think at most 3 people can be named for each nobel price.

krischer• 13 years ago

The European Union won it before. So I think organizations are fine.

henrikschroder2• 13 years ago

I was just listening to the news, and apparently over 3000 people were more or less involved with the work at CERN. I don't think the physics prize has ever been awarded to an institution like the peace prize has been in the past, and I think the Academy simply chose not to break tradition.

_pferreir_2• 13 years ago

They could have awarded it to the CMS and ATLAS experiments as well. No need to award it to CERN.

gitaarik2• 13 years ago

The award is for the theory that is confirmed. The people of CERN didn't get awarded because they didn't come up with the theory, they just tested it.

bfe• 13 years ago

They often award the physics prize for experimentally verifying a theoretical prediction. For example, they awarded the prize to Paul Dirac for predicting the existence of the positron, and to Carl Anderson for confirming it.

hwstartup• 13 years ago

While I agree with your comment, I'd leave out the 'just' part.

mnl• 13 years ago

Well... no. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for the discovery of the W and Z particles (January 1983). Glashow, Salam and Weinberg were awarded with it in 1979, before the Electroweak Theory was fully confirmed, although there were solid hints at that time, it was a bit premature.

I'm really not too happy about this because the Nobel prize has shunned deserving scientists again. The consensus is that this mechanism can be attributed to three papers, One from Englert and Brout, another from Higgs, and yet another from Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble.

The silly rule of having to give the award to at most three living authors rules out Brout and, as it would be a problem to choose one of GHK (because they signed in alphabetical order, good for them) it's too obvious why they're out, even when the current understanding of the theory can be traced back to their string of papers.

This is not the first time: for instance, nobody really understands why Cabibbo wasn't awarded some years ago along with Kobayashi and Maskawa... for the CKM matrix!

henrikschroder2• 13 years ago

Anyone with more insight know if this was overdue, but finally awarded after confirmation last year at CERN, or if it was pushed forward while last year's work was fresh in people's minds?

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

The Nobel committee doesn't give out the prize for theoretical advances that aren't backed up by experiment. Since the data was not yet overwhelmingly conclusive at this time last year, this year's award was basically the earliest possible award date for a decades-old idea.

vanattab3• 13 years ago

Really? What do you call Obama peace prize then.

vanattab3• 13 years ago

Obama got the peace prize without any evidence.

VLM2• 13 years ago

"aren't backed up by experiment"

Sadly, I was expecting arguments by string theorists along the lines of the longbets.org bet for $2000 that no one is going to get a Nobel for anything related to string theory, but I guarantee we'll get ten times as much "Obama" instead.

Can't we please argue about that instead of making fun of our "concentration camp warmonger in chief", maybe just in one thread please?

jimmytidey• 13 years ago

Hawkins also holding out for recognition if anyone finds confirmation of Hawking Radiation.

biggfoot• 13 years ago

Hawkins? You mean Hawking?

flexie• 13 years ago

They say that professor Higgs is shy and not at all comfortable with the attention and almost as hard to find as his particle.

kemiller• 13 years ago

I'm sensing you're being facetious, but not knowing the personalities involved, what does this mean? Is he a notorious publicity hound?

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

Means pretty much what it says, Professor Higgs is quite uncomfortable with publicity.

Apparently, he's on holiday right now, with no phone / email. Almost certainly deliberately.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

facetious? That's a good humor.

discreteevent• 13 years ago

They couldn't contact him initially because he was away without a phone. If you want to be effective.... (He certainly isn't wasting part of his evening reading HN like me)

nemesisj• 13 years ago

This is great news, and comes as a bit of relief to some. I remember talking with a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was concerned about delays with CERN referencing the fact that the Nobel prize isn't awarded posthumously, and not as many are saying, not for theory without proof. Really glad to see he made it!

sambeau2• 13 years ago

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind people of the (sometimes a little forgotten) other person name-checked in the Higgs Boson: Satyendra Nath Bose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose

He was an interesting chap!

claudius2• 13 years ago

He certainly had an interesting life, but I don't think the person giving their name to half the particles in the universe can be called ‘a little forgotten’.

sambeau2• 13 years ago

Ha. True.

But, I'm not sure people know that a Boson is named after him at all and if they do I'd bet they assume (like I once did) that Bose was some German or Hungarian bloke.

(Mind you, I also thought that the Bose of Bose Corporation[1] would have been a European rather than Indian descent, too. Clearly, I have some prejudice I need to work out).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

It's probably worth bringing up a couple other famous Indian scientists such as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. These three folks have made major contributions to science and mathematics, in the same league as, say, Heisenberg, Bohr, or Riemann. And even though there are important phenomena or properties named after them (e.g. Raman spectroscopy, Chandrasekhar limit, etc.) as people they are far, far less well known than European scientists.

elliptic• 13 years ago

I don't think those 3 are any less well-known than other physicists and mathematicians of similar accomplishments. Ramanujan, in particular, because of his romantic story, is far more well known than his influence might suggest. His intellect might well have been the equal of Riemann's, but one can't honestly say his contributions even approach Riemann's. The same goes for the the physicists - Bohr was one of the three or four most important physicists of the last century, and Heisenberg was one of the top 10, probably.

simbolit• 13 years ago

is the nobel prize still the cornerstone of rewarding achievement in the sciences?

sorry to be so snarky, but i am genuinely interested, having long lost any trust in the peace prize comittee[0]. not to speak of the economics prize (which is not really a nobel prize [1])

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laure...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economi...

edit: formatting

notjustanymike• 13 years ago

I certainly lost a lot of faith in the Nobel peace prize when they gave it to Obama. It seemed like a political gesture more than a true recognition of significant accomplishments.

aestra3• 13 years ago

The Nobel Peace Prize was a joke before Obama.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peace

phaus2• 13 years ago

it took you this long? They awarded it to Al Gore for climate change awareness (has alot to do with peace i guess?) Even worse, they have awarded it to supporters of terrorism(Arafat), and other violent types of people(Mandela).

Ma8ee2• 13 years ago

The Peace Prize and the science prizes have very little to do with each other except that all the prizes (except the economy prize, as you pointed out) was created by Alfred Nobel. The science prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, while the Peace Prize is awarded by a 5 member committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. So in some sense the Peace Prize is a political prize from the start, even if I don't think it was Nobel's intention.

theorique4• 13 years ago

It's still considered the peak in the sciences.

The economics price is much newer ("Memorial", as you cite), although also very prestigious in its own field, and Peace is not really a science.

tedsanders2• 13 years ago

Yes, the Nobel prize is still the creme de la creme of prizes (in physics).

Source: Me, a physics PhD student who has met a few Nobel laureates

P.S. It's amazing how much universities and people like to affiliate with Nobel laureates just because of their award, and not their science. When I was at a university where a professor won the Nobel prize, he gave a talk identical to one held the previous year. Before the prize, about 10 people showed up. After the prize, hundreds showed up and couldn't fit in the room.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

At Berkeley, Nobel laureates get a parking spot on campus.

tim_hutton• 13 years ago

"While standing around at the back of morning assembly Higgs noticed a name that appeared more than once on the school's honours board. Higgs wondered who PAM Dirac was and read up on the former pupil. He learned that Paul Dirac was a founding father of quantum theory, and the closest Britain had to an Einstein. Through Dirac, Higgs came to relish the arcane world of theoretical physics."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/02/peter-higgs-p...

bvv• 13 years ago

This article provides some historical context to today's prize.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/10/08/the-twists-and-turns...

sgt101• 13 years ago

I think that there are about 15 events in the 125Gev bump.

Just sayin'....

alphaBetaGamma• 13 years ago

Robert Brout would almost surely be sharing the prize if it could be awarded posthumously.

I often saw him and Francois Anglert when doing my Ph.D. Robert Brout in particular struck me as the kindest man on earth, and was perhaps someone who though even deeper and more profoundly than Francois Anglert.

cft• 13 years ago

the theoretical foundation for Higgs mechanism was first discovered by Jeffrey Goldstone from MIT:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambu-Goldstone_boson

namuol• 13 years ago

Feynman on the Nobel Prize: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMaBmik4VYg

m4tthumphrey• 13 years ago

Thanks, Englert and Higgs, thanks to you we won £300 at the pub quiz last night. You rock.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs

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