"The entire physics community anticipated Tuesday that Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences would bestow a Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that plays a crucial role in the fabric of the universe. But who, exactly, would get the honor? The aging theorists who dreamed it up back in 1964? Or the mostly younger experimentalists who last year said they’d found it? The academy went with the theorists — two of them, at least. The new Nobel laureates are 84-year-old Englishman Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, and Francois Englert, 80, of Belgium. That left out in the cold several other theorists who could plausibly claim to have deserved the honor as well."


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