Higgs field prediction lands Nobel Prize in physics
By Andrew Grant and Gabriel Popkin
By Science News
The prediction of the mass-bestowing Higgs field and the famous particle that goes with it has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.
The Nobel committee selected Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and François Englert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, who in 1964 separately proposed the existence of a field that permeates the cosmos and gives mass to certain elementary particles. Confirmation of their theory came on July 4, 2012, when researchers at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, near Geneva, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.