Nobel Prize 2013: Francois Englert And Peter W. Higgs Get Awards For Physics Research

By Jobs & Hire Staff Reporter | Oct 08, 2013 12:01 PM EDT

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Two physicists have recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for their significant research work into the mysterious Higgs-Boson particle.

The Higgs-Boson particle, is also called the God Particle as it was said to have been the root of everything.

Francois Englert and Peter Higgs had been awarded for their efforts last Tuesday.

The Nobel Prize award for Physics is given annually to anyone who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of Physics. Englert and Higgs had been on the radar for the expected win.

Francois Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist and Peter Higgs who is a British physicist earned the prize for having theoretically discovered the "mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass subatomic particles."

Higgs and Englert had theorized the particle's existence in the 1960s as a means to explain why and how matter has come to be with mass, several decades before scientists at the CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva) confirmed that it truly did exist.

"I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy," Higgs said in a statement, "I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research."

Higgs and Englert's 1960s theory was likened to molasses in the snow-as the molasses flows, more snow sticks to it and the lump grows larger. The Higgs-Boson particle, they believed, caused the building blocks of nature to stick together, forming mass.

The search for the elusive God-particle took decades, thousands of scientists, mountains of data from trillions of protons colliding in the Large Hadron Collider. Costing about $10 billion dollars to construct, the collider produces energy to simulate 1-2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.

One in a trillion collisions will produce the specific Higgs-Boson particle.               

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