The British physicist Peter Higgs – father of the “God Particle” – Nobel laureate in Physics, actively supported the movement for the boycott of Israel’s university institutions, as a result of which he did not go to Jerusalem to receive the “Wolf” physics prize.
Higgs, born in 1929 in England, is the one who formulated the theory and discovered the existence of the “god particle”, the boson we now know.
His PhD (1954) was titled: “Some Problems in Molecular Oscillations” and it was what prompted him to study the application of symmetry principles to physical systems.
In 1964, he published two papers in the journal Physical Rev. Letters, on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking, thereby explaining how particles referred to in the established standard could acquire mass.
This mechanism predicts the existence of a boson, whose field fluctuations are what give rise to the mass of all particles associated with it. This particle had not been detected experimentally until now. The latest experimental data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN provide strong evidence for finding the particle. Englert and Robert Brutt, who died in 2011, were also instrumental in the discovery.
In 2004, the three physicists were awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize, an Israeli prize awarded by the Knesset and the Wolf Foundation. However, Higgs refused to go to Jerusalem to receive the “Wolf” award as he was opposed to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
The existence of the particle has been the subject of scientific controversy for decades. After a series of experiments starting in 2008, his theory was proven correct by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012.
In 2013, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with the Belgian François Angler.
Read also: Peter Higgs: The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered the “Higgs Boson” has died
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