Englert and Higgs Win Nobel Prize in Physics After String of Delays

Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences after a series of unusual delays.

It must have been a close call. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the organization that gives out the Nobel Prize, announced a string of delays on Twitter before finally announcing the decision this morning at 7:45 a.m. ET.

COMING UP: additional 15 minute delay, earliest 12:45 pm CET, 2013 #NobelPrize in Physics

— Nobelprize_org (@Nobelprize_org) October 8, 2013

Higgs and Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for the theory of how particles acquire mass. Higgs and Englert were awarded "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass subatomic particles and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider," the organization wrote on Twitter.

"The awarded theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed. In 2012, the Higgs particle is discovered at CERN - the missing piece of the Standard Model puzzle," the organization continued.

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