|
| FILE - In this Wednesday, July 4, 2012, file photo, Belgian physicist Francois Englert, left, and British physicist Peter Higgs answer a journalist's question about the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva. Englert and Higgs were awarded the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013. |
STOCKHOLM
(AP) -- Nearly 50 years after they came up with the theory, but little
more than a year since the world's biggest atom smasher delivered the
proof, Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgian colleague Francois Englert won
the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping to explain how matter
formed after the Big Bang.
Working
independently in the 1960s, they came up with a theory for how the
fundamental building blocks of the universe clumped together, gained
mass and formed everything we see around us today. The theory hinged on
the existence of a subatomic particle that came to be called the Higgs
boson - or the "God particle."
In one of the
biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades, scientists at CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced last year that
they had finally found a Higgs boson using the $10 billion particle
collider built in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French
border.
In a statement issued by the
University of Edinburgh, where he retired as a professor, the famously
shy, 84-year-old Higgs said he hoped the prize would help people
recognize "the value of blue-sky research."
Englert,
80, said the award pointed to the importance of scientific freedom and
the need for scientists to be allowed to do fundamental research that
doesn't have immediate practical applications.
"You
don't work thinking to get the Nobel Prize," said Englert, a retired
professor at the Free University of Brussels. Still, "we had the
impression that we were doing something that was important, that would
later on be used by other researchers."
The
Nobel selection committees are notoriously cautious, often allowing
decades to elapse before honoring a scientific breakthrough, and their
choices are hard to predict. But this time, the prize went to people who
were widely expected to get it.
"In CERN
here, most all of the physicists I know, about 95 percent, expected
those two would win it. The question was if there would be a third and
who it would be," said Joe Incandela, a professor of physics at the
University of California at Santa Barbara and leader of the CMS
experiment, one of the two groups that discovered the Higgs particle.
Before
the announcement, there had been questions over whether a group of
American scientists who published a paper shortly after Higgs would also
be honored, or whether any of the thousands of scientists at CERN would
share in the prize, too.
But that would have been a tricky decision for the judges, since each Nobel Prize can go to only three winners.
Ulf
Danielsson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which
awards the physics prize, noted that the prize citation also honored the
work done at CERN.
"This is a giant
discovery. It means the final building block in the so-called Standard
Model for particle physics has been put in place, so it marks a
milestone in the history of physics," Danielsson said.
The
two winners will share a prize worth 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.2
million). The Nobel Prizes, established by Swedish industrialist Alfred
Nobel, have been given out since 1901.
CERN
Director General Rolf Heuer said he was thrilled for Higgs and Englert,
while many of the thousands of scientists who worked there broke into
applause when the announcement was made after an unusual - and
unexplained - one-hour delay. (It could be a while before the world
finds out the reason for the delay, because the academy's deliberations
are kept secret for 50 years.)
Englert and Higgs were trying to provide an answer to a riddle: How did matter form soon after the Big Bang?
They
proposed the existence of an invisible field that sprawls through space
like a net. The building blocks of matter, they suggested, acquired
mass when this field trapped them. Much later, as the universe cooled,
they formed atoms that eventually became stars and planets.
To
detect the field, the scientists suggested looking for the Higgs boson,
because all fields are associated with a particle. Decades would pass
before scientists were able to confirm the existence of this particle.
Only
about one collision per trillion will produce a Higgs boson in the
giant atom collider, and it took CERN several months after the discovery
of a new "Higgs-like" boson to conclude that the particle was, in fact,
very much like the one expected in the original formulation.
The
phrase "God particle" was coined by Nobel-winning physicist Leon
Lederman, but it's disliked by most physicists because it connotes the
supernatural. Lederman said later that the phrase - mostly used by
laymen - was really meant to convey that he felt it was the "goddamn
particle," because it proved so hard to find.
Michael
Turner, president of the American Physical Society, an organization of
physicists, said the Higgs particle captured the public's imagination.
"If
you're a physicist, you can't get in a taxi anywhere in the world
without having the driver ask you about the Higgs particle," said
Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago.
Turner
said the Higgs is the first in a class of particles that scientists
think played a role in shaping the universe. That means it points the
way to tackling mysteries such as the nature of dark energy and dark
matter, he said.
The physics prize was the
second of this year's Nobels to be announced. On Monday, the Nobel in
medicine was given to U.S. scientists James Rothman, Randy Schekman and
Thomas Sudhof for discoveries about how key substances are moved around
within cells.
