Winner of the Nobel exchanged civil engineering physics; see trajectory - Terra Brazil

The British physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian François Englert (right) won the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2013 provide for the existence of the Higgs boson Photo: Denis Balibouse / Reuters

“The Nobel?’ve thought, but it was never a motivation or a source of anxiety. My pleasure found in the search,” he said in 2012 the Belgian François Englert, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the next to Peter Higgs, one of the fathers of “Higgs boson.”

Born in Brussels on November 6, 1932, François Englert graduated in civil engineering and then followed the path of physics. “I realized that what mattered was to understand the laws governing phenomena, and less technically how to use them,” he told the magazine last year, Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he developed most of his career and which still has an office full of documents.

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After obtaining his doctorate in physics, Englert moved in 1959 to Cornell University in the United States, where he met the American professor Robert Brout, your future “complicit” in one of the greatest advances 20th century physics.

Brout Englert decided to accompany the return to ULB in the early 1960s. In college, the two were inspired by the theories of Japanese Yoichiro Nambu (Physics Nobel 2008) to understand the phenomena that affect the scale of the atom.

“In 1964 we were assured of the logical consistency of our teoira and published our paper in Physical Review Letters, said. text was published two weeks before that of Peter Higgs.

While studies of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN, based in Geneva) in 2012 confirmed the work, Englert said he was very happy.

“But it caused an excitement comparable to that felt in 1964 when alongside Brout understand that our theory had no failures logical point of view,” said the scientist, before regrettable that Peter Brout , who died in 2011, has not followed the events.

In July, Englert received from King Albert II of Belgium the title of baron. The physicist has received numerous international awards such as Francqui in 1982, the High Energy and Particle Prize of the European Physical Society in 1997, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004, the JJ Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society in 2010 and the prize of the Prince Asturias in 2013.

Englert The name is also associated with the model of cosmic inflation, a phase of accelerated expansion of the universe would have registered at its inception, allowing it to be homogeneous and isotropic in the distance.

With an easy smile, François Englert always used pleasure as their research base. “Physics is a bit like a drug. Still interested in some problems,” said music fan, which considers the scientific establishment “a form of aestheticism”.