On October 8, 2013, the Nobel Committee Finally Crowned the 'God Particle'

Nearly five decades after their theory, Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded physics' highest honor for predicting a particle that gives the universe mass.

On October 8, 2013, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Peter Higgs and François Englert would share the Nobel Prize in Physics, capping one of the longest waits in the award's history. Their theoretical work, published independently in 1964, had predicted the existence of a fundamental particle responsible for giving mass to matter — a idea so elusive it took the world's largest machine, buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border, to finally catch it in the act.

The Long Wait

The theory that would eventually bear Higgs's name emerged from a deceptively simple question: why do particles have mass at all? In 1964, Higgs and, separately, Englert (working with the late Robert Brout) proposed that an invisible field permeates all of space, and that particles gain mass by interacting with it. For decades the idea remained mathematically elegant but physically unconfirmed, a placeholder theory waiting on technology to catch up. Physicists nicknamed the particle tied to that field the 'Higgs boson,' and eventually, less reverently, the 'God particle' — a label Higgs himself reportedly disliked, finding it overstated and a little embarrassing for something so thoroughly explainable by physics.

Confirmation finally came in July 2012, when researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had detected a particle consistent with the long-theorized boson, smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light to briefly recreate conditions from the universe's first fractions of a second. Fourteen months later, the Nobel committee made it official, awarding the prize jointly to Higgs and Englert — Brout having died in 2011 and thus ineligible under Nobel rules barring posthumous honors. Higgs, notoriously press-shy, reportedly went out for lunch on the day of the announcement and couldn't initially be reached by reporters, a fittingly understated end for a man whose name had spent fifty years attached to one of physics' biggest ideas.