The particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the theorists who predicted its existence nearly a half-century ago.

WSJ: New Particle Found, Consistent With Higgs Boson

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee created and named the Web (also commonly called "W3" for short in those days) in 1989 at CERN.

CNN: Team rebuilding world's first website

The fifth, the Higgs boson (after Peter Higgs, a British physicist who helped to predict it), is what gives other particles their masses.

ECONOMIST: Particle physics makes sense, but it assumes too much

Three years later a British physicist, Arthur Eddington, watched what happened to light from stars that were close in the sky to the sun during a solar eclipse.

ECONOMIST: Spotting dark matter, at last

It was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs, a British physicist who was trying to fix a niggle in quantum theory, and independently, in various guises, by five other researchers.

ECONOMIST: The Higgs boson

So when, in 1928, a British physicist called Paul Dirac solved such an equation relating to the electron, the fact that one answer described the opposite of that particle might have been brushed aside as a curiosity.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics

So far, no scientific studies have backed up his claim, but British physicist and TV presenter professor Brian Cox, who came here in 2010 to film scenes for his BBC documentary series Wonders of the Universe, has said that he holds similar beliefs.

BBC: In Venezuela, nature��s most electrifying lightning show

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

BBC: Web tool 'as important as Google'

The British Royal Navy asked the physicist to find out why cavitating bubbles were causing damage to the propellers of its vessels.

BBC: Shrimp, bubble and pop

For Mark Oliphant, the most exciting time of his early career was when he won a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, in whose Cavendish laboratory British scientists first split the atom.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant