Now that the Higgs boson has been discovered, the question is who gets the Nobel Prize. This will be tricky because the discovery was made by two detector teams with hundreds of scientists using the CERN LHC accelerator involving hundreds more and although Higgs gets the eponymous credit for the prediction, there were actually three papers published almost simultaneously on the topic, with five of the authors still alive. In fact, we only call it the Higgs boson because of a citation error by Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg (see here). One could even argue further that the Higgs boson is really just a variant of the Goldstone boson, discovered by Yoichiro Nambu (Nobel Laureate) and Jeffrey Goldstone (not a Laureate). This is a perfect example of why as I argued before (see here) that discoveries are rarely made by three or fewer people. Whatever they decide, there will be plenty of disappointed people.
