Higgs & Englebert Nobel Prize

[Dave2042]

http://www.nobelprize.org/

A fine day for particle physics. Congratulations to the winners.

A tough call for the committee, given that it's generally agreed that 6 people came up with the Higgs mechanism more or less simultaneously, while the prize can only be shared three ways. (Brout, Englebert's co-author is dead and thus ineligible, so I guess he has moral rights.)

On the down-side, every lazy science journalist in the world will now be using that idiotic phrase to describe the Higgs boson.

[sjastro]

Hopefully future Nobel Prizes will be directed to those who came up with the experimental design framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(particle_physics)) of where to look for the Higgs boson.

Their contributions are just as significant.

Regards

Steven

[Dave2042]

Indeed.

However it is often said that the committee generally errs towards experimental awards, and that this could reflect a relative nervousness about theory. Allegedly this is because a properly reviewed and replicated experimental result stands forever, while a theory is much more susceptible to being found wanting along way down the track (not an argument I am entirely convinced by, but there you go).

So as someone who leans more towards the theory and maths, I'm always pleased to see something like this.

[Dave2042]

And I've just realised I misspelled Englert's name. D'oh!

[madbadgalaxyman]

Nobel Prizes reward individual achievement, but arguably there seems to be less and less of that in science, with many papers that can have 50 or 100 authors plus (especially some very populous Chinese papers, where it is difficult for non-chinese speakers to tell one author from another!)

I think there is still such a thing as the individual genius who sees further than others and makes a major discovery, but science is increasingly a collaborative endeavour.......so perhaps the Nobel prizes should be "reformed" to reflect the idea that many discoveries are now made by gigantic groups of people.

[sjastro]

Ironically the 1979 Nobel Prize was awarded for work on a theory that assumed the Higgs mechanism existed. The electroweak theory predicted the existence of neutral currents and the W and Z bosons.
The prize was awarded due to the detection of neutral currents in 1973.
The W and Z bosons were found in 1983.

Despite the experimental success it was a bold step by the committee at the time to award the prize based on a theory that was not fully supported by experimental evidence until the detection of the Higgs boson some 33 years later.:)

Regards

Steven