The British theoretical physicist died at the premature age of 95 on Monday, April 8, in Edinburgh, Scotland Peter Higgs. The shy and somewhat reclusive scientist won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his theoretical work on how the Higgs boson gives elementary particles their mass.
“Apart from his extraordinary contribution to particle physics, Peter was an extraordinary human being, an extremely humble man, a great teacher and someone who could explain physics very simply and in depth,” said Fabiola Gianotti for The Guardian – Director General of CERN and head of one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, which in 2012 helped confirm the existence of the Higgs particle.
“God Particle” Prediction
Peter Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle. After receiving his doctorate from Kings College, London, he spent a short time at the University of Edinburgh. During the years 1954 to 1956 he moved to London, but in 1960 he returned to Edinburgh, where he worked as a lecturer at the Institute of Mathematical Physics.
In 1964, he made a prediction that had a huge impact on world physics: he postulated the existence of a field that surrounds the universe and that gives particles mass shortly after the big bang. This field was to be associated with its own particle, which was later named as Higgsův boson.
The Higgs boson has become a fundamental building block of the standard model of contemporary particle physics. It is nicknamed the “God particle”, however Higgs himself, in an interview with New Scientist magazine in 2017, described the term as an unfortunate conflation of theoretical physics with inappropriate theology.
Nobel Prize in Physics
Higgs later admitted that he initially did not realize how significant his theory would turn out to be. “At the time, it was not clear how it would apply to particle physics, and those of us who were working on it in 1964 were looking for an application in the wrong place,” he said.
In July 2012 the assumption was confirmed by experiments in the hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland. The results of the experiments coincided with the predicted values up to 95%. Higgs himself hoped that it would be possible to use the accelerator to link particle physics with cosmology and the search for dark matter, but these questions remain open for now.
A year later, Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, one of the many prizes and honors he received for his work. Even after his retirement in 1996, Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and collaborate with colleagues and students.
