The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded when a theory is ‘tested by time’ which in practice means confirmed by hard evidence. For example, Peter Higgs was one of the scientists who, back in the 1960s, suggested the existence of a particle that would give other particles their mass. Nearly fifty years later, two different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider spotted signs of what had become known as the Higgs Boson. It was a triumph of science and engineering, of clever theory and hard-won evidence; and as a result Peter Higgs and François Englert, a Belgian scientist, were jointly awarded the
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