François Englert · Science & Medicine
Theory of the mechanism giving elementary particles mass (Higgs mechanism)
1932, Etterbeek, Belgium — 18 June 2026, Belgium
Belgium (Université libre de Bruxelles)
François Englert is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Theory of the mechanism giving elementary particles mass (Higgs mechanism)
Origins and early life
François Englert was born on 6 November 1932 into a Belgian Jewish family, and survived the Holocaust as a hidden child: during the German occupation he had to conceal that he was Jewish and lived in orphanages and children's homes at Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and finally Annevoie-Rouillon, until the American army reached those towns. He qualified as an electromechanical engineer at the Free University of Brussels in 1955 and took a doctorate in physical sciences there in 1959, then spent two years at Cornell, where he met Robert Brout; Brout followed him back to Brussels, and the two worked together for the rest of Brout's life.
Work and career
The problem they solved in 1964 was that the equations describing forces demand that the particles carrying them be massless, which is true of the photon and plainly false of the particles carrying the weak force. Brout and Englert showed that if empty space is not empty but filled with a field of a particular kind, the force-carrying particles acquire mass from it without the equations losing their symmetry; Peter Higgs reached the same result independently that year, and a third paper by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble followed.
Later years
The field implies a particle, and when CERN found it in 2012, forty-eight years later, Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Higgs — Brout had died in 2011 and could not be named. Englert also held a chair at Tel Aviv University, and died on 18 June 2026.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Physics 2013
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Theory of the mechanism giving elementary particles mass (Higgs mechanism)
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Physics 2013
