'God Particle' wins Physics Nobel for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert

As expected this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went for the much famed theoretical discovery of a mechanism that gives mass to subatomic particles. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theoretically found that Higgs boson is the particle that gives mass to the all known subatomic particles when they interact with this higgs field. Their theory is the central part to the Standard Model of particle physics that shows how the world is constructed.

Higgs and Englert through their theory shows how the subatomic particles while interacting with a special invisible energy field gains mass and lead to the formation of the Universe. Without this field all the subatomic particle would have scattered in every direction with the speed of light. The particle which generates this field is the Higgs boson which is also called by some as the ‘God Particle’. The Higgs Boson is present everywhere in the Universe. Atoms and parts of the atoms that zoom past the higgs boson get attracted to it form clusters gaining mass.

Proposing the theory is different from finding it practically. But the scientists at CERN research laboratory through their Large Hadron Collider experiment detected Higgs boson in 2012 much to the excitement of the scientific community. During the experiment it became very hard to find the particle which led some scientists to call it “goddamn particle” much to their agony. At last they found the particle at an energy level of 125Gev.

Though the discovery fills a hole in the Standard Model but the model itself does not fully explains the cosmic mysteries. The Model says that the neutrinos do not have any mass, but some recent studies show that neutrinos have mass. And also the model explains only the visible matter when one third of the Universe is of unknown or dark matter of which nothing is known.

We have to salute these two for finding the fundamental physical particle that makes us all and paving the way for understanding the cosmos by man.