Nobel Prize For Physics Awarded To Higgs and Englert

For their work on the Higgs boson

Two theorists who predicted the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson almost 50 years ago — and were proven right just last year — won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday.

British physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert shared the honors, announced in Stockholm at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

It was Higgs, 84, who lent his name to the particle that sparked a multibillion-dollar quest. The 80-year-old Englert and his late colleague, Robert Brout, proposed the particle's existence independently in 1964.