After yesterday’s tribute to people who are not smart, today we recognize those who are extremely smart.

This morning the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

Or in other words:

For a great explanation of everything that led to this latest breakthrough, you can’t do better than Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a comprehensive history of the people and ideas that shaped scientific discovery in the centuries leading into our present day. The Nobel is one of the best science awards you can get; Coming of Age in the Milky Way is one of the best science books you can read.

– Michael Moats