Long View

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the winners for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics -- two gentlemen who figured, 50 years ago, that there had to be something there that they weren't seeing. English physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert are the two men who, when studying the atom in the late 1950s and early 1960s, came up with the idea of a subatomic particle that helped create a field which gives mass to other particles (and thus, to everything else).

Earlier this year, researchers uncovered direct evidence of the Higgs boson, sometimes known as the "God particle" because of its essential role in the existence of existence. The discovery confirmed Higgs and Englert's theories about mass and its role in what physicists call the Standard Model of how things are what they are.

The CNN story notes that among the first to pop the champagne (and, no doubt, measure the trajectory, distance and landing spot of the cork for comparison to other corks) were the researchers at CERN, the laboratory and particle accelerator where the experiments that actually discovered the Higgs boson took place. Few seemed to feel left out that the two men who predicted the particle got a prize while they, the people who actually found it, didn't. That is the way of things in physics, one researcher said. 

After all, it's not as though Higgs and Englert were awarded their prize back when they first theorized the particle. I mean, if you awarded a Nobel Prize based on potential achievement rather than any actual record, why, it might turn out that you had bestowed an honor on someone which they might turn out to not really deserve.