Peter Higgs passed recently and his name is associated with one of the biggest concepts of 20th physics: the Higgs boson. Higgs and all of the other physicists that are associated with this symmetry breaking mechanism were celebrated and awarded during their lifetimes. The most consequential awards being the Sakurai prize, even before the Higgs was confirmed experimentally, and the Nobel prize, after the Higgs bosons was experimentally confirmed.
The story of the discovery of the mechanism and all of its subtleties is very much nuanced and I will just say that I agree with Peter Woit when he says that Anderson should have a very big part of the credits on this story because he fleshed out almost all of the important details almost two years before everyone else and in the context of solid state physics.
I will link to three very important articles on the web on this story and please do check the links therein (the first two deal with the history of the Higgs boson and the final one with the mechanism itself):
- The Anderson-Higgs Mechanism – the article on Peter Woit’s blog
- Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism (history) – the historical article on Scholarpedia
- Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism – the technical article on Scholarpedia
From Suits to Spectra 