Physics Nobel prize for Higgs and Englert: Why the God particle our world ... - ABC Online

50 years ago, François Englert and Peter Higgs presented a theory that contributes centrally to explain how the world is structured. They received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Why the decision many colleagues would, but also raises questions.

Beginning of July 2012 were images of the British physicist Peter Higgs around the world. In an auditorium of the European nuclear research center CERN in Geneva, some researchers had just declared that they had most likely named after Higgs particle – a so-called boson – discovered. Since taking the then 83 year old, who was sitting in the auditorium quietly, his glasses and wiped his eyes.

The theory that predicts the boson, Higgs had already developed in 1964. Regardless invented by the Belgian physicist Robert Brout and François Englert the same hypothesis. It was confirmed – at least with some probability – the discovery of the particle at Cern

A key part of the explanation of how the world is built

.This Englert and Higgs won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. My late colleague Brout 2011 is not considered, because the posthumous award of the prize is excluded. Higgs researched until his retirement in 1996 at the Edinburgh Scottish Universiät, which two years later Englert emeritus at the Free University of Brussels. “The theory explains how particles acquire their masses,” says the Stockholm Nobel committee choosing the winners. “It is a central part of the standard model of particle physics, which describes how the world is structured.” That excludes all one, from flowers to people to planets and stars, all of which consist of a few blocks.

The standard model provides a type of building block for the universe

It describes what structures and masses of matter have and how they interact with each other. But it is incomplete. Because it involves only three of the four known forces of nature, namely the strong and weak nuclear force. The former holds the atomic nuclei, the latter radioactive atoms to disintegrate. In addition, the electromagnetic force, the current flowing and can shine light. The gravity but missing.

Until his discovery of the Higgs boson was considered the last missing piece in the Standard Model. It gives other particles at least a part of its mass. The theory of Higgs and his colleagues suggest there are an energy field that fills the entire universe. Each particle moving therein interacts with the field. It undergoes a kind of friction, as a man who is running in a swimming pool by the water. He is moving slower than in the air – just as if it would grow in mass

The Higgs particle in turn arises from an excitation energy of the field as of the proton collisions. particle accelerator “Large Hadron Collider” (LHC) is the nuclear research center CERN. Which is comparable with a swirl in the water of the pool.