A Polish Jewish family in Brussels
François Englert was born on November 6, 1932, in Brussels, Belgium. His parents were, in his words, from a simple family of Polish Jews. They had emigrated from Poland in 1924 with his elder brother, then a few months old, looking for a better economic life and escaping an antisemitic environment. In Belgium they worked hard, opened a textile shop and built a decent life for their two sons.
In May 1940, when François was seven, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Persecution came gradually, he later wrote. After two years of relatively normal life he was forced, like all Jews who could not hide their identity, to wear the yellow Star of David. A few months later the deportations began, carrying Belgian Jews to the camps where they were murdered.
A hidden child
The Englert family survived because strangers hid them. To improve the children’s chances, his parents separated from them and went into hiding in a place François did not know. He was taken in by Camille and Louise Jourdan, who ran a café-restaurant in Lustin, a village in the Ardennes; their daughter Yvonne taught him the piano, which he remembered as a glimmer of hope in a world of desperation. After someone denounced the family in Lustin, they fled and were reunited in the village of Annevoie, where the local priest, Father Warnon, presented them to the villagers as Christians. The priest baptised François so that he could attend the Catholic college of Notre-Dame de Bellevue in Dinant as an ordinary pupil, and he enrolled his brother, dressed in a fake cassock, in a seminary school. Over the war years François lived under a false identity in orphanages and children’s homes in Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and Annevoie-Rouillon, until American troops liberated the area.
His parents and brother also survived. Their relatives in Poland did not: the entire Polish family was murdered by the Nazis. In his Nobel autobiography, written seventy years later, Englert paid tribute by name to the Jourdans, to Father Warnon and to the many others who had helped them, writing that without these people he would not be here to tell the story. Memories of those years, he added, haunted his sleep long after the war.
From engineer to physicist
After the war Englert went back to school and developed a love of literature, music and mathematics. His mathematics teacher and his parents, worried about his future, steered him toward engineering, and in 1955 he graduated as an electromechanical engineer from the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB). He soon realised that he was more interested in the theory underneath than in practical applications. Working as a teaching assistant to pay his way, he took a master’s degree in physics in 1958 and a doctorate in 1959.
That year he went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as research associate to a young professor, Robert Brout. Their first meeting, he recalled, was unexpectedly warm, and it began a scientific partnership and lifelong friendship. They worked on magnetism, superconductivity and phase transitions, and became fascinated by the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking, which the Japanese-American physicist Yoichiro Nambu had just brought from the physics of materials into the physics of elementary particles. In 1961 Englert turned down a professorship at Cornell to return to Europe. Brout followed him to Brussels, resigned from Cornell, took Belgian nationality, and the two men led the ULB theoretical physics group together for decades.
Where mass comes from
In the early 1960s particle physics faced a crisis. The most promising theories of the forces of nature worked only if their force-carrying particles had no mass. That was fine for the photon, which carries electromagnetism. But the weak force, which drives radioactive decay and the nuclear reactions that power the Sun, acts only over tiny distances, which meant its carriers had to be heavy. No one could see how to give them mass without wrecking the theory.
In 1964 Brout and Englert published a short paper in Physical Review Letters showing how it could be done. If empty space itself is filled with a particular kind of field, in a state that breaks the underlying symmetry the way the aligned atoms of a magnet break the symmetry of space, then force carriers that interact with that field acquire mass and act only over short ranges, while those that do not interact stay massless. Peter Higgs in Edinburgh reached the same result independently weeks later, and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble published a third version that year. Higgs pointed out that the theory predicted a new particle, a ripple in the field. The idea, now called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, became the cornerstone of the electroweak theory and of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Confirmed at CERN
The predicted particle proved extraordinarily hard to find. It took nearly half a century, the competition of two great laboratories, Fermilab in the United States and CERN near Geneva, and the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre ring and probably the most complex machine ever built. On July 4, 2012, CERN announced that its ATLAS and CMS experiments, each involving about 3,000 scientists, had found a new particle with the properties of the Higgs boson. Englert and Higgs were both in the audience and met for the first time that day.
Robert Brout had died in May 2011 after a long illness and missed both the discovery and the prize. In 2013 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Englert and Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.” The same year King Albert II made Englert a baron, and he shared the Prince of Asturias Award with Higgs and CERN.
The discovery required colliding protons travelling at more than 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, up to 40 million times a second, inside detectors buried 100 metres underground, and sifting the debris for the rare signatures of a particle that decays almost instantly. The particle found had a mass of about 125 GeV, roughly 130 times that of a proton. For Englert, then 79, it was the confirmation of an idea he and Brout had written down almost half a century earlier as young men in Brussels.
Why it matters
The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism answers a question so basic that it is easy to overlook: why matter holds together at all. Without the field it describes, electrons would have no mass, would race through space at the speed of light, and could never be captured into atoms. There would be no atoms, no chemistry, no stars of the kind we know, and no life. It also explains why the weak force is weak and short-ranged, which governs how the Sun burns and how radioactive elements decay.
The mechanism completed the Standard Model, the most precisely tested theory in science and the framework within which all of today’s particle and nuclear physics is done. The decades-long search to confirm it drove advances in superconducting magnets, particle detectors and worldwide distributed computing, and trained generations of scientists and engineers who carried those skills into medicine, industry and information technology. Englert himself regarded the deepest open problem as reconciling Einstein’s gravity with quantum theory, and he worked on supergravity, string theory and cosmology; with Brout and Edgard Gunzig he proposed in the late 1970s an early version of the idea that the newborn universe underwent a rapid exponential expansion, later known as inflation.
A survivor’s gratitude
Englert spoke about his wartime childhood with restraint, but he made sure it was part of the record. His Nobel autobiography opens not with physics but with the courage of his parents, who, he wrote, always put the lives of their children before their own, and with the names of the Belgians who hid them.
He also kept close ties with Israel. From 1984 he was a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at Tel Aviv University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, and he visited its Institute for Advanced Studies regularly for more than four decades. He was also a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California.
Family and character
Englert was married to Mira Nikomarow. He had five children: Michèle, Anne and Georges from his first marriage, to Esther Dujardin, and Sarah and Hélène from his second, to Danielle Vindal. Colleagues remembered him as remarkably humble, gracious and kind, approachable and generous with his time; the physicist John Ellis recalled his modest and polite manner, despite his justified pride in his work.
He remained professor emeritus at the ULB, where the group he and Brout founded had trained brilliant students, many of whom became renowned physicists, and he continued to think about fundamental questions well into his eighties.
Death and legacy
François Englert died on June 18, 2026, in Uccle, Brussels, at the age of 93. CERN, Tel Aviv University and physicists around the world mourned him as one of the architects of modern particle physics.
His life joined two of the twentieth century’s great stories. As a child he was marked for death because he was Jewish and survived because strangers chose to risk their lives for him. As a man he helped explain why the universe has substance at all, an idea confirmed by one of the largest scientific collaborations in history. Every textbook account of the origin of mass now carries his name.
Sources & further reading
François Englert, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013, Popular information, NobelPrize.org · Belgian Nobel-prize-winning theoretical physicist François Englert dies aged 93, Physics World · IAS mourns the passing of IAS Scholar, Nobel Laureate François Englert, Tel Aviv University · François Englert, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.