Thousands of scientists were involved in hunting down the Higgs boson, this generations greatest discovery in particle physics. But for the committee awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics, two names mattered most. In an announcement on 8 October in Stockholm, Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels were named Nobel laureates for developing the theory of what is now commonly called the Higgs mechanism: the process by which a field pervading space gives other fundamental particles mass, and which implies the existence of the Higgs boson. Regarding the committees choice, "I think in all honesty, this is what I would have done," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.
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