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    Higgs boson a no-win situation for Nobel prize committee

    Nobel Prize goes to Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs

    Kate Lunau
    <p>Mandatory Credit: Photo by Rex Features (1792830n)<br /> The simulation of a Higgs boson decaying, CGI images of experiments to find the God Particle &#8211; Higgs Boson, The simulation of a Higgs boson decaying &#8211; CGI images of experiments to find the God Particle &#8211; Higgs Boson<br /> ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) &#8211; a particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.<br /> ATLAS is 44 metres long and 25 metres in diameter, weighing about 7,000 tonnes.<br /> The hunt for the Higgs boson &#8211; the &#8216;God particle&#8217; that holds the universe together &#8211; is over.<br /> Scientists at Switzerland&#8217;s CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research) announced the discovery to an audience including Professor Peter Higgs, who first suggested the existence of the particle four decades ago.<br /> Professor Higgs, 83, wiped a tear from his eye as the findings were announced, and later said<br /> Has The Higgs Boson Been Found?<br /> For all you physicists out there, the wait is finally over and the champagne corks can get popping: the Higgs boson &#8211; or God Particle &#8211; has finally been (probably) discovered.</p> <p>48 years after Professor Peter Higgs first thought up the concept while walking through the Cairngorms, scientists at Cern&#8217;s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have announced to the world that their long experiment has finally brought results they were looking for.</p> <p>However, plenty of analysis lies ahead to confirm that the particle they have found is the genuine article &#8211; or perhaps something even more exciting</p>

    Rex Features/CP

    Updated: The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs:

     

     

     

     

    Rex Features/CP

    On the eve of the awards science writer Kate Lunau explained why identifying who should get credit for the discovery would not be easy: 

    Last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson particle has been hailed as the greatest scientific discovery in decades — our generation’s moon landing.

    On Oct. 8, when the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced, many will consider it a travesty if the Higgs isn’t recognized.

    And yet deciding who, exactly, should get credit for pinpointing the “God particle” may prove almost as impossible as finding the subatomic speck in the first place.

    The Higgs particle is a tiny bump in an invisible force field that stretches through the universe, giving mass to elementary particles. Without it, we wouldn’t exist. The particle was famously dreamed up by the University of Edinburgh’s Peter Higgs, in 1964, and went on to bear his name. But something must have been in the air, because five other theorists published similar ideas around the same time. (Belgian physicist Robert Brout died in 2011.)

    The Higgs particle, which completes the famous Standard Model of Physics, became the subject of the biggest scientific hunt ever undertaken: four decades of search, culminating with the massive experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s powerful underground particle accelerator. There, thousands of scientists (including many Canadians) observed particles slamming together at nearly the speed of light, then sifted through reams of data for telltale patterns suggesting a Higgs had briefly appeared before vanishing again.

    That puts the number of people involved in the Higgs search and discovery at thousands.

    The Nobel Prize in Physics can be shared by three at most, still fewer than even the five surviving theorists who conceived it.

    Related feature: The Higgs boson discovery changes everything.

    tags:Higgs bosonnobel prize