Franois Englert, Nobel-winning Higgs physicist, dies at 93

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François Englert, the Belgian Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the Higgs boson, died on 18 June 2026 at the age of 93, his family announced the following day.
Born in Brussels in 1932, Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs for their theoretical work that predicted the existence of the Higgs field, the mechanism by which fundamental particles acquire mass. The discovery was confirmed experimentally at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012, a milestone that reshaped modern particle physics. Colleagues recalled a scientist whose intellectual boldness was matched by personal warmth; Marc Henneaux, a physicist at the Université libre de Bruxelles, told *La Libre Belgique* that Englert “was a great physicist, but he also taught me to appreciate opera.”
In Frankfurt, Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher whose critique of modernity shaped post-war German democracy, was commemorated on 19 June 2026 in the Paulskirche, where Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier lauded his “unbroken energy in resisting the mechanisms of power.” The ceremony, held days after Habermas’s death on 14 March 2026, underscored his legacy as a guardian of deliberative democracy. Yet critics noted “gaps” in his thought, particularly regarding the European project’s democratic deficit.
Wulf Herzogenrath, the German curator who transformed museums into spaces for videokunst and mass audiences, died on 19 June 2026 at 82. As director of the Bremen Kunsthalle and later chief curator of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, Herzogenrath championed experimental media, bridging the divide between avant-garde art and public engagement. The *Frankfurter Allgemeine* described him as a “visionary museum man” whose exhibitions redefined contemporary curation.
These losses follow the death of Trond Johansen, the Norwegian resistance legend and intelligence pioneer, who died on 19 June 2026 at 102. Known as “the father of Norwegian signals intelligence,” Johansen’s work during and after World War II earned him national honours, with Norway’s *Aftenposten* hailing him as “a man of honour.”
Amid the tributes, France’s National Library announced the rediscovery of a lost Mozart manuscript, composed in 1778 when the composer was 22. The work, to be performed publicly for the first time on 21 June 2026 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, offers a rare glimpse into the young Mozart’s creative process.
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