Congratulations to Dr. Peter Higgs and Dr. Francios Englert. On Tuesday October 8th, 2013 Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert received the Noble Prize in Physics for their discovery of the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is believed to be the particle that gives all other subatomic particles their mass, and was discovered in July of 2012 by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize gives clear validation not only to Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert but also to the countless other physicists at CERN who worked on the project. The theory for the Higgs Boson was first conceived in 1964 and after 50 years, science has taken another step forward in solving the mysteries of particle interaction.
There were a number of skeptics who felt that such a particle would never been found do to the amount of energy required to complete the experiment and the size of the particle itself. The most notable skeptic was Dr. Steven Hawking who lost a $100 bet. While I'm not a physicist, I too had my doubts. I thought that such a particle was just another step in the direction of the quantification of space/time, which in my opinion appears to be the case with String Theory. But, I've come to believe that there has to be another field responsible for other such mysteries such as quantum entanglement.
There has been some speculation that due to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, science may be on the cusp of a new paradigm in modern physics. Some believe that it won't be long before light speed travel can be achieved. Or, at least we would be able to un-mass objects by turning off the Higgs, making them easier to launch into space.
What ever the future brings after the discovery of the Higgs Boson, make no mistake about it, it's discovery is huge. In fact, some are calling the Higgs Boson the, "God Particle." At the very least, I think that it's safe to say that our understanding of how the universe works has just taken a quantum leap forward.
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