Belgian-Jewish physicist Francois Englert, pictured, will share the Nobel Prize in Physics with British physicist Peter Higgs. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Belgian-Jewish physicist Francois Englert and British physicist Peter Higgs will share the Nobel Prize in Physics, for their famous discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.

Englert, 80, was born to a Belgian Jewish family and survived the Holocaust by hiding his Jewish identity and living in various Belgian orphanages and homes. A professor emeritus at the University of Brussels, Englert also has ties with Tel Aviv University as the Sackler Professor by Special Appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Higgs, 84, is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Englert and Higgs theorized about the existence of a particle that acts as one of the basic building blocks of the universe. The particle later became known as the Higgs Boson or “God particle,” during their work in the 1960s. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Switzerland-based CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, later confirmed the Englert-Higgs findings in 2012.