LOS ANGELES — THE physicist Richard Feynman liked to gripe about what he called “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first mistake was the invention of dynamite. The second was creating theNobel Prizes. Mr. Feynman thought it was ridiculous that something as material as a cash prize should be awarded to something as grand and open-ended as scientific research. (The griping wasn’t a matter of sour grapes; Mr. Feynman shared a well-deserved prize for physics in 1965.) This year’s physics Nobel has just been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs, for what is simply called “the Higgs mechanism.” But while Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs undoubtedly deserve acclaim, bestowing an award on them alone distorts the nature of modern physics research.
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