Who will get the "Nobel" for Higgs?

All week I was waiting for a brief and interesting note about probable Nobel laureates in physics for the discovery of the Higgs boson, and now, finally, Seth Zenz, one of the quantumdiaries bloggers, published a short article with a translation of which I will introduce you. Why did this topic interest me right now? Judge for yourself - the official confirmation that the open particle is indeed the Higgs boson appeared only this year (that is, this achievement should be awarded this year), and less than a week is left before the announcement of the Nobel Prize winners !

According toThomson Reuters (and not only) this year, the Nobel Prize in Physics will go to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for their theory of the existence of a boson, later named after them. Awarding this prestigious award for recognition and appreciation of the developed theory to only two named scientists will undoubtedly be a strong simplification - Robert Braut, who worked with Englert, died in 2011; Herald Guralnik, Karl Heigen and Tom Kibble independently published the results of their work on this topic at the same time as Higgs, Englert and Brought. This six has already been awarded the Sakurai Prize in the field of theoretical particle physics in 2010 for "discovering the Higgs mechanism for breaking electroweak symmetry", but it is obvious that the Nobel Prize is much more prestigious.

If only two out of six scientists receive the award, it will be completely within the tradition of presenting the Nobel Prize. Although the greatest scientific discoveries were made by brilliant scientists, often such achievements were the result of joint development and exchange of ideas. The positive side of such an award will be some symbolism of the prize awarded to the two most famous scientists who have made the greatest efforts in resolving this issue.

Of course, the main reason for interest in the Higgs boson is the experimental confirmation of its existence. Is it possible that the award will also be received by those who conducted experimental work to find it? Honestly, I don’t see how you can reward an individual for the efforts that thousands of people have made over the course of several decades. These people have solved a huge number of problems in the construction of the largest accelerator complex ever built on Earth. And I would like the Nobel Committee to change its traditions and award CERN itself along with scientists in physics.

The prize given to CERN would also become symbolic. Not all those who participated in the search for the Higgs boson work at CERN, thousands of participants in this process from the very beginning worked in various laboratories and universities around the world. But as the “forge” of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN symbolizes the tremendous work that has been done to make this discovery possible. It was not a flash of insight from one brilliant scientist, but the work of a huge team, daily solving the most difficult scientific and technical problems, in a word, everything happened as usual and a "big science" is created.

In order to diversify my reasoning with a small fraction of humor, take a look at the articleScientific American, whose authors decided in advance to award the Higgs boson itself with the Nobel Prize. My favorite excerpt: “The CERN PR department employees put on huge Higgs boson costumes, doing everything possible to portray the fleeting nature of this particle: they rushed from one end of the room to the other, kept hiding and appearing from behind the curtains, breathing, briefly answered questions about the symmetry and fluctuations of the vacuum . "

Winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced this Wednesday, October 8th.

Sources:
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2013/10/01/a-higgs-nobel-and-to-whom/
http://thomsonreuters.com/press-releases/092013/nobel-laureates
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/09/30/in-surprise-advance-announcement-2013-nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-to-higgs-boson/
http: //www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/about/prize_announcements/
http://thescience.ru/2013/10/04/a-higgs-nobel-and-to-whom/