‘God Particle’ Fetches Nobel for Higgs and Englert

Peter W. Higgs (left) and Francois Englert (right). Simulated experimental data showing the collision of two protons producing the God Particle, Higgs Boson, which decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The bright orange lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector (Center). Image credit: Lucas Taylor via creative commons.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2013 jointly to a British-born Peter W. Higgs of University of Edinburgh, and a Belgium-born François Englert of  Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, for their pioneering research on the theory of how particles acquire mass. The theory, originally conceived in 1964 by the duo independently of each other was later confirmed in 2012 by the discovery of a so called God Particle, Higgs Boson at the now famous CERN’s subterranean laboratory, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located just outside Geneva, Switzerland. The duo was awarded the coveted prize “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” said Nobel Committee in its press release.

CERN's main site, from Switzerland looking towards France (Image credit: Brucke-Osteuropa via Creative Commons). Did the Nobel Committee overlook CERN ─ Europe’s and world's leading particle physics laboratory, the very organization that is instrumental in finding out the existence of Higgs boson in 2012 after a series of experiments conducted at its LHC, a particle accelerator ─ while awarding this year's prize?