Higgs’s bosuns

WILL he or won’t he? That was the question on the mind of anyone with a passing interest in the topic as representatives of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science prepared to announce the winner of this year’s Nobel physics prize. Well, he did. Half a century after predicting the existence of the particle which bears his name Peter Higgs, of Edinburgh University, was awarded science’s highest accolade. Another, even bigger mystery was who would share the honour—and the cheque for SKr8m ($1.2m). In the event, after postponing the announcement twice (rare for the punctual Swedes) the prize-givers plumped for François Englert of the Free University of Brussels.

Unusually for Nobel laureates in science, Dr Higgs is already a household name. The search for his boson, which theory predicts gives other particles their masses, started in earnest, and with immense publicity, in 2008. That was when CERN—Europe’s (and the world’s) leading particle-physics laboratory—switched on the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator whose first task was to find it. When the boson’s existence was confirmed, in 2012, Dr Higgs became the bookies’ favourite for an early Nobel prize.