Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs (opens in new tab)

Means pretty much what it says, Professor Higgs is quite uncomfortable with publicity.

Apparently, he's on holiday right now, with no phone / email. Almost certainly deliberately.

facetious? That's a good humor.

Ha. True.

But, I'm not sure people know that a Boson is named after him at all and if they do I'd bet they assume (like I once did) that Bose was some German or Hungarian bloke.

(Mind you, I also thought that the Bose of Bose Corporation[1] would have been a European rather than Indian descent, too. Clearly, I have some prejudice I need to work out).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

I don't think those 3 are any less well-known than other physicists and mathematicians of similar accomplishments. Ramanujan, in particular, because of his romantic story, is far more well known than his influence might suggest. His intellect might well have been the equal of Riemann's, but one can't honestly say his contributions even approach Riemann's. The same goes for the the physicists - Bohr was one of the three or four most important physicists of the last century, and Heisenberg was one of the top 10, probably.

At Berkeley, Nobel laureates get a parking spot on campus.

The Nobel Peace Prize was a joke before Obama.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peace

it took you this long? They awarded it to Al Gore for climate change awareness (has alot to do with peace i guess?) Even worse, they have awarded it to supporters of terrorism(Arafat), and other violent types of people(Mandela).

"aren't backed up by experiment"

Sadly, I was expecting arguments by string theorists along the lines of the longbets.org bet for $2000 that no one is going to get a Nobel for anything related to string theory, but I guarantee we'll get ten times as much "Obama" instead.

Can't we please argue about that instead of making fun of our "concentration camp warmonger in chief", maybe just in one thread please?

Obama got the peace prize without any evidence.

Really? What do you call Obama peace prize then.

Hawkins? You mean Hawking?

Well... no. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for the discovery of the W and Z particles (January 1983). Glashow, Salam and Weinberg were awarded with it in 1979, before the Electroweak Theory was fully confirmed, although there were solid hints at that time, it was a bit premature.

I'm really not too happy about this because the Nobel prize has shunned deserving scientists again. The consensus is that this mechanism can be attributed to three papers, One from Englert and Brout, another from Higgs, and yet another from Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble.

The silly rule of having to give the award to at most three living authors rules out Brout and, as it would be a problem to choose one of GHK (because they signed in alphabetical order, good for them) it's too obvious why they're out, even when the current understanding of the theory can be traced back to their string of papers.

This is not the first time: for instance, nobody really understands why Cabibbo wasn't awarded some years ago along with Kobayashi and Maskawa... for the CKM matrix!

They often award the physics prize for experimentally verifying a theoretical prediction. For example, they awarded the prize to Paul Dirac for predicting the existence of the positron, and to Carl Anderson for confirming it.

While I agree with your comment, I'd leave out the 'just' part.

The European Union won it before. So I think organizations are fine.

They could have awarded it to the CMS and ATLAS experiments as well. No need to award it to CERN.