physics
British physicist Peter Higgs has died. He won the Nobel Prize in 2013 together with the Belgian François Englert. He will go down in history as the discoverer of the elementary particle that gave his name: the famous Higgs boson.
When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in 2013, it was slightly later than usual. After all, the Nobel Prize Committee could not reach the British Peter Higgs. The extremely shy man had gone out for dinner – soup and trout, as it turned out – and did not have his phone with him. And so it was that on his way home Higgs learned from a former neighbor that he had won the Nobel Prize.
The price was not unexpected, however. In 2012, an experiment in the Swiss particle accelerator Cern proved that the elementary particle, which he had ‘theoretically’ discovered in 1964, actually existed.
Englert was first
But Higgs was not the only discoverer. In fact, the Belgian François Englert and the American Belgian Robert Brout were exactly 15 days earlier, but the particle still went down in history as the Higgs boson or Higgs boson. Higgs owes this to the influential American physicist and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg. In an article from 1967, Weinberg first cited Higgs’ work. He later admitted that he had misread the publication dates of the three 1964 articles. In the popular press it is also called the ‘god particle’, although most physicists abhor that name.
The Nobel Prize Committee rewarded both teams: both Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize. Not Brout, because he had already died in 2013. Now Peter Higgs has also exchanged the temporary for the eternal, reports the University of Edinburgh. Higgs was 94 and died at home in Edinburgh.
Jon Butterworth, a professor of physics at CERN, told the British newspaper The Guardian that Higgs was “a hero for particle physics.” “The particle that bears his name is perhaps the most stunning example of how seemingly abstract mathematical ideas can make predictions that turn out to have enormous physical consequences.”
