Britain's Peter Higgs And Belgium's Francois Englert Win Physics Nobel For Work On ‘God Particle’

British physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert of the Université libre de Bruxelles, the two scientists who predicted the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson particle in the 1960s, which was detected in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland, have won the this year’s Nobel prize in physics.

The existence of the subatomic particle, which took its name from Higgs, 84, was first proposed by him along with his late colleague, Robert Brout, almost 50 years ago in 1964.

Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning physicist, gave the Higgs boson particle its almost universally known nickname, ‘the God Particle,’ only to later call it the ‘Goddamn Particle’ because it took so long to be found, NBC reported. Higgs, a famously publicity-shy and modest personality who is now professor emeritus at Edinburgh, once told The Guardian: "If it wasn't there, we wouldn't be here."