Robert Hyman Brout, Scientist and Humanist

Abstract

Robert Hyman Brout was born in New York on 14 June 1928, and died in Linkebeek (south of Brussels) on 3 May 2011. A chemist by training, he was one of the great theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. His initial scientific interests were in statistical physics. In the 1960s he became interested in particle physics. He is best known for his discovery in 1964, together with François Englert, of the mechanism by which particles acquire mass. This led in 2012 to the discovery at CERN of a new elementary particle, the elementary excitation of the Brout–Englert–Higgs field, often known as the Higgs boson. He also suggested, together with François Englert and Edgard Gunzig in 1978, that the universe started with a period of inflation, a scenario which is now central to cosmology. Robert Brout received some of the highest scientific honours, including the Wolf prize, and would have shared the Nobel prize in 2013 with Englert and Higgs for the discovery of the mass generation mechanism in particle physics, had he not died before it was awarded.