François Englert: The Physicist Who Predicted the Mass of Particles

On November sixth, nineteen thirty-two, François Englert was born in Etterbeek, Belgium. He is a theoretical physicist, and his academic field is elementary particle physics and quantum field theory.

Englert is one of the principal architects behind one of the most important theoretical discoveries in modern physics: the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Together with his colleague Robert Brout, and independently of Peter Higgs, Englert published a theory in nineteen sixty-four that solved a fundamental problem: How do elementary particles acquire mass? Their theory proposed that the universe is filled with an invisible field – the Higgs field – and that particles gain mass by interacting with this field. A prediction of the theory was the existence of an associated boson, the Higgs boson, which is a manifestation of the field. It took nearly half a century before particle physicists had accelerators powerful enough to hunt for this particle. When the Higgs boson was finally discovered at CERN in two thousand and twelve, the theoretical work of Englert, Brout, and Higgs was confirmed. For this groundbreaking work, François Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in two thousand and thirteen.