Theoretical physicists Peter Higgs and François Englert, the two responsible for setting forth the idea of the "God particle," have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.
"You may imagine that this is not unpleasant," Dr. Englert said at a press conference.
Higgs, on the other hand, might still not even know he won the Nobel Prize, according to a New York Times report.
The two will split a $2 million prize that they will receive Dec. 10 in Stockholm.
The God particle, more technically known as the Higgs boson, was the last missing piece in the Standard Model of physics. The Higgs boson field is what gives other particles mass and it fills up the entire known universe.
"Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process," reads the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release.
CERN laboratory formally confirmed the Higgs particle July 4, 2012 after two teams of 3,000 scientists each from the ATLAS and CMS research groups observed a countless number of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is one of the most sophisticated tools physicists have to study our universe. It zips particles along at near-light speeds before colliding them, revealing, for the briefest of moments, secrets normally unseen.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cautions that there is still a long way to go before understanding the intricacies of the universe. For instance, the Standard Model miscalculates some particles with mass as massless, and there's still the looming question of dark matter, invisible mass that accounts for more than 80 percent of the mass in the entire universe.
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