Peter Higgs
Peter Higgs proposed the mechanism that gives elementary particles mass, and waited forty-eight years for the experimental confirmation. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, the son of a BBC sound engineer, he was asthmatic and educated largely at home for periods. At school in Bristol he noticed the name Paul Dirac repeatedly on the honours board and looked him up, which turned him towards theoretical physics. He studied at King's College London, took a doctorate in molecular physics, and moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1960, where he stayed. The problem he addressed was that the mathematics describing the weak nuclear force required its force-carrying particles to be massless, and they plainly were not. In 1964 he wrote two short papers. The second, initially rejected by the journal Physics Letters as of no obvious relevance, proposed that space is filled with a field which particles interact with, acquiring mass in proportion to the strength of that interaction — and, crucially, that the field must have an associated particle. That prediction of a detectable boson is what made the idea testable and why his name attached to it. Robert Brout and François Englert published the same mechanism weeks earlier, and three others independently that year; six people share the credit. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built partly to find it. On 4 July 2012 two experiments announced a particle at about 125 GeV, and Higgs, present in the auditorium, wept. He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize with Englert. He had no email, published fewer than a dozen papers, and said he would not be productive enough for a modern university. He died in 2024.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: physicist
