Peter Higgs and Francois Englert win Nobel Prize

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The Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for the discovery of the Higgs boson.

“I am overwhelmed to receive this award,” Higgs said in a statement released by the University of Edinburgh. “I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.”
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Pretty sure neither of them actually discovered the Higgs boson. They basically said "hmmm there could probably fit another particle here, lets do the math, yup math seems good"

They thought it up nearly 50 years ago before they finally "found it" (or did they) either way, the actual energy of the particle has changed so much over the years it's not funny.
 
While it's cool that the prize went to someone who actually deserved it, is it good to award the prize to something that hasn't been proven yet?

Unless I'm missing that the particle was actually discovered.
 
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
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The article never stated that Higgs and Englebert discovered the Higgs-boson.
 
From what I understand, Peter Higgs and the others proposed a mechanism that could give fundamental particles their mass. In order to prove this Higgs field exist, you have to look for the boson particle that transmit it. So this Higgs boson is the particle they were looking for to prove that the Higgs mechanism is correct.

So their contribution here is the proposal of this Higgs mechanism. They discovered the idea from which this particular boson particle came from.

The observation of this particle is of course done by the LHC, not Higgs himself.
 
Hornet said:
From what I understand, Peter Higgs and the others proposed a mechanism that could give fundamental particles their mass. In order to prove this Higgs field exist, you have to look for the boson particle that transmit it. So this Higgs boson is the particle they were looking for to prove that the Higgs mechanism is correct.

So their contribution here is the proposal of this Higgs mechanism. They discovered the idea from which this particular boson particle came from.

The observation of this particle is of course done by the LHC, not Higgs himself.
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Excellent summary.

The theory was pretty much pushed aside for at least a decade as "too out there" -- interesting how they kept coming back to it.
I'm glad that someone who really deserved the prize got it.
 
Can't wait till the LHC starts up again in 2015, with the new upgrades they are doing we will be able to see so much more.
 
mecra said:
While it's cool that the prize went to someone who actually deserved it, is it good to award the prize to something that hasn't been proven yet?

Unless I'm missing that the particle was actually discovered.
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If we were to do that, quantum physics would never win awards! :D
 
Stiletto said:
If we were to do that, quantum physics would never win awards! :D
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change quantum to theoretical and you're spot on.

My issue with Higgs winning is what exactly did he win this for? To compare to the guy who won for his discovery of dark energy. That was based off Einstein's field equations and the cosmological constant, even if he said it was his biggest mistake, and many physicists after that also came up with similar conclusions, yet the guy who got enough data to show that yes the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate is the one who got the Nobel

I'm also not quite comfortable with the whole Higgs discovery, my understanding is that if you jump back a couple decades, it was predicted to be a certain mass. They didn't find it, then they increased the value, didn't find it, did it again and again and finally found something with the mass that they say had to be the Higgs. With exchange mesons like the pion, they actually said "ok this is the range it needs to be" and sure enough it was there. The Higgs they've been jumping all over the place to find it. Now they found it, so how do we show that this Higgs boson actually does what Higgs the owner of a shiny new medal says it does?
 
sfsuphysics said:
Pretty sure neither of them actually discovered the Higgs boson. They basically said "hmmm there could probably fit another particle here, lets do the math, yup math seems good"

They thought it up nearly 50 years ago before they finally "found it" (or did they) either way, the actual energy of the particle has changed so much over the years it's not funny.
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In fact, I'd venture to say that there actually hasn't been a direct identification of the actual particle itself. They are still looking for it.
 
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