While the laureates’ contributions have undeniably shaped modern technological advances, including machine learning, some have argued that the award recognises work more closely related to computer science and mathematics than traditional physics.
The award to Higgs and Englert was 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