The humor can get a little deeper once we understand that the Higgs particle is responsible for all things having mass.
The Higgs Prize will give young physics students the chance to win a trip to Cern, where work researching the Higgs particle continues.
Their work, for example, has helped to focus the search for the Higgs particle, the entity which, according to current theory, gives matter its mass.
What do you expect to be the next big post-Higgs breakthrough particle to be isolated or proven?
FORBES: Did Peter Higgs Deserve To Win A Nobel Prize This Year?
It is an exclusive club and now also includes Professor Peter Higgs, who predicted a new particle, the Higgs Boson, in the 1960s, and this year the particle was proved to exist.
Mr. Higgs received a round of applause as he entered the auditorium, and shed a tear when news of the Higgs-like particle was announced.
Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.
That means that for every particle we know, even the Higgs, there is a partner particle with similar interactions but that is more massive.
Indeed, until they do so, they are reluctant to definitively crown the boson, preferring often to say just that they have found a "Higgs-like" particle.
This relies upon the critical coupling and therefore is strong evidence that this particle is a Higgs boson.
FORBES: Did Peter Higgs Deserve To Win A Nobel Prize This Year?
The Higgs boson is the only particle theorized by the standard model of physics that hasn't been conclusively observed in an experiment.
Yet the easiest way to sell it to politicians was to frame it as a search for a single particle, the Higgs boson.
As is often the case in particle physics, a fuller analysis of data will be required to establish beyond doubt that the particle is a Higgs of any kind.
Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether the new particle is the Higgs boson of the standard model, or one of several other bosons predicted by other theories of physics.
Detecting the Higgs boson takes a lot of particle collisions -- there's only one observed event in every trillion proton-proton collisions, CERN said.
Because nobody knows what the mass of a Higgs boson might be, the particle must be hunted indirectly, typically in giant machines that propel particles to near-light speed, then smash them together and generate an array of other subatomic particles.
WSJ: Physicists Find Signs of Higgs Boson, or 'God Particle'
One way to look beyond the Standard Model is to question the Higgs's status as an elementary particle.
ECONOMIST: The hunt for physics��s most elusive quarry is over
Five spoke at a press conference last year to announce the discovery of a particle thought to be the Higgs, but it was only Prof Higgs who received a huge round of applause from the researchers present.
The Higgs is a fundamentally new type of elementary particle that we have never seen before.
The theory predicts the existence of a new particle, which also carries Prof Higgs' name.
BBC: Peter Higgs: honour for physicist who proposed particle
The particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the theorists who predicted its existence nearly a half-century ago.
At at a physics conference in March to discuss the discovery of the Higgs, researchers were encouraged to refer to the particle as the "SM Scalar Boson".
However, this could merely be a statistical fluke that results from the fact that to date only a few score of Higgs candidate events have been observed amongst billions of particle collisions.
The particle is a component of something called the Higgs field, which permeates our universe.
However, other researchers independently came up with similar ideas and they, along with Prof Higgs, have long argued for the name of the particle to be changed.
In July, a team from the European nuclear research facility at Cern, Geneva, announced the detection of a particle that fitted the description of the elusive Higgs.
Physicists in Geneva are close to discovering the last particle they need to complete the model, the Higgs boson.
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The elusive particle is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles obtain mass.
At the time of Higgs' discovery, observers were especially interested in the possibility that this mysterious particle didn't decay in exactly the way science had predicted.
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