Higgs and Englert win the Nobel Prize for Physics

After James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Sudhof won the Nobel Prize dor medicine last Monday, Britain’s Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday. The prize is awarded for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. This duo have been a favorite for this honor since their work has been vindicated experiments at the CERN research centre’s gigantic particle collider.

The original work was done almost 50 years back by them. But in 2012, it has been finally proved by experiments at the CERN research centre’s giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva.

Hailed as the masters of one of the most important discoveries of physics, Higgs and Englert won the honor prized at 8 million Swedish crown ($1.25 million).

It is ironical that Indian scientist Satyendranath Bose who pioneered the work on quantum physics in 1920 that provided the foundation of the Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons or particles with spin named after Bose – never got the Nobel prize. Even CERN chief agreed the fact and told that Bose deserved it. But since, Nobel is not awarded posthumously the award will continue to elude the scientist.

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About Sankha Ghosh

Sankha Ghosh was never born in that 'City of Joy', never was a banker, never watched a Godard, never loved Kafka, never fell for that Solitary Reaper, never danced on a friend’s wedding, never fought for human rights, never had a crush at college and never ever aspired to work on a novel! Never was he as simple as this! #He wishes