Nobel Laureate François Englert, Who Theorized the 'God Particle,' Dies at 93

François Englert, the Belgian physicist who co-theorized the Higgs boson, often called the 'God particle,' has passed away at the age of 93. Englert, a Nobel laureate, was instrumental in developing the theoretical framework that explains how fundamental particles acquire mass.

Born in Belgium to Polish-Jewish immigrants, Englert's early life was marked by hardship during the Nazi occupation. After studying electrical and mechanical engineering, he transitioned to physics, earning his doctorate in 1959. In the early 1960s, Englert and his colleague Robert Brout proposed a groundbreaking hypothesis: the existence of an invisible field pervading the universe that imparts mass to other particles. Their mathematical proof was published in 1964, shortly before Peter Higgs published a similar theory.

This theoretical work, known as the Brout-Englert-Higgs field, became a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics. While the particle associated with this field became widely known as the Higgs boson, partly due to its mention in a 1972 paper by Korean physicist I-hsiu Lee, the theory itself was a monumental achievement of 20th-century science.

The existence of the Higgs boson was experimentally confirmed in 2012 at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Englert and Higgs were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for their theoretical discovery. With Englert's passing, all three key figures in the development of the Higgs mechanism theory, Brout, Englert, and Higgs, have now died, marking the end of an era in fundamental physics research.

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I would want to kiss them and say that if I achieved anything in my life, it is thanks to them and my parents.