Peter W. Higgs
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013
Born: 29 May 1929, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Died: 8 April 2024, Edinburgh, Scotland
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.
Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, to a Scottish mother and an English father who worked as a sound engineer at the BBC. Because he suffered from asthma, Higgs received part of his early education at his home in Bristol before moving to London to study math and physics at age 17. Higgs received his Ph.D. from King's College in 1954. He then moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he has remained, with the exception of a few years spent in London in the late 1950s.
According to modern physics, matter consists of a set of particles that act as building blocks. Between these particles lie forces that are mediated by another set of particles. A fundamental property of the majority of particles is that they have a mass. Independently of one another, in 1964 both Peter Higgs and the team of François Englert and Robert Brout proposed a theory about the existence of a particle that explains why other particles have a mass. In 2012, two experiments conducted at the CERN laboratory confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle.
Peter Higgs, a giant of British science who came up with the idea of the Higgs boson particle.
He was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 2013 for his revolutionary work showing how the boson helps bind the Universe together.
"His name will be remembered as long as we do physics in the form of the Higgs Boson."
In the 1960s Higgs and other physicists worked on an idea to explain why the building blocks of the Universe have mass.
It sparked a search for the Holy Grail of physics - a particle that could explain three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and the strong nuclear forces) in one theory.
In 2012 scientists using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland finally discovered it - they named it the Higgs boson.
A year later Higgs' work was recognised in his Nobel Prize which he shared with Francois Englert of Belgium.
He was a shy man who was uncomfortable with the attention his theory brought him. When the announcement was made, he wiped a tear from his eye, but told journalists: "It's very nice to be right sometimes."
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