The British physicist, who has died aged 94, predicted the existence of the Higgs boson in the 1960’s; the God Particle. He is remembered across the science industry as a humble and inspirational scientist.
(Image: National Geographic)
Few scientists have known much fame in recent years as British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012, who died on 8 April, aged 94.
Prediction Proved True Beyond Doubt
Higgs, 60 years ago, suggested that an elementary particle with unusual properties could pervade the Universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists thought of this mechanism independently around the same time, including François Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building at the time, which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields.
Two experiments — called ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) — at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed Higgs’s predictions 50 years later and the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced. It was the last missing component of the standard model and Higgs and Englert shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for predicting the particle’s existence. Physicists at the LHC continue to learn about the properties of the Higgs boson, but some researchers say that only a ‘Higgs factory’ — a dedicated collider that can produce the particle in copious amounts — will enable them to gain a profound understanding of its role.
“Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, an immensely inspiring figure for physicists around the world, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple yet profound way,” said Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.
The End of an Era
Higgs’s work continues to be of fundamental importance, said physicist Sinead Farrington at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “We’re still on an exciting journey to figure out whether some further predictions are true, namely whether the Higgs boson interacts with itself in the predicted way and whether it might decay to other beyond-the-standard-model particles,” she told the Science Media Centre.
Higgs’s death represents “the end of an era”. “Higgs was a fortunate scientist: he lived to see his insight at age 30 turn up in experiments 50 years later,” he posted on X. “His role and influence in our understanding of the #universe will be remembered for millennia.” – science writer Matt Strassler
