THE physicist Richard Feynman liked to gripe about what he called “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first mistake was the invention of dynamite. The second was creating the Nobel Prizes. Mr. Feynman thought it was ridiculous that something as material as a cash prize should be awarded to something as grand and open-ended as scientific research. . . . This year’s physics Nobel has just been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs, for what is simply called “the Higgs mechanism.” But while Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs undoubtedly deserve acclaim, bestowing an award on them alone distorts the nature of modern physics research.
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The Higgs mechanism was proposed on the basis of imagination and rigorous thinking, with only crude guidance from experimental data. Finally, in 2012 — after 48 years, billions of dollars and the work of thousands of talented experimental physicists — we finally saw a tiny bump in data plots obtained at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. That bump, evidence that the collider was producing Higgs bosons, was an amazing vindication of the work of Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs years before.
Except that it wasn’t only Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs. Like many ideas in physics, the Higgs mechanism came together with contributions from many different people, including renowned physicists like Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble. But only Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs are sharing the Nobel.
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