Francois Englert

! scientist · # tag · @ author

род. 1932 · Theoretical physics, elementary particle physics

Belgian theoretical physicist, one of the discoverers of the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, which explains how elementary particles acquire mass. He shared the Nobel Prize with Peter Higgs.

Biography

Born in 1932 in Etterbeek, Belgium. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he received his doctorate in 1959. He worked at Cornell University, then returned to Brussels, where he became a professor. In 1964, together with Robert Brout, independently of Higgs, he proposed the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

Key discoveries

Independent discovery of the mechanism
that gives mass to gauge bosons (known as the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism) in 1964
thereby solving the mystery
of how weak interaction particles become massive
while preserving gauge invariance.

💡 Englert was almost unknown to the general public before the Nobel Prize; when he received the call from Stockholm in 2013, the first thing he did was send a fax to his co-author Brout, who had passed away in 2011, writing: 'Dear Robert, we did it.' Englert also enjoys painting and playing the cello.

Quote: "When Brout and I were working on this problem, we didn't think about fame; we were just trying to understand how nature could be both symmetric and broken."

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Francois Englert

Biography

Key discoveries

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