Francois Englert and Peter HIggs recognized by science's top award for helping to explain why the universe exists. Not so much, at least untill today, when the two were awarded the 2013 Nobel prize in Physics.
Francois Englert, now 80, and Peter Higgs, now 84, effectively saved the universe - if not destruction then from irrationality. The existence of mass is not a sure thing, even in a cosmos like ours that is so full of gas and dust and what Carl Sagan memorably called stuff.
Science explicators burned through no shortage of metaphors trying to explain how the things that became known as the Higgs field and Higgs boson worked. The field was like a great wind, they said. The higher the energy of a massless particle passing through it, the higher the resistance it encounters, and that would coner mass. The Higgs bosons are like paparazzi surrounding a celebrity, other explained. The greater the fame the bigger the crowd - and again, the greater the mass. The particle and field, still others say, are like molasses on snow, causing, well a kind of cosmic clumping.
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