Peter Higgs: The physicist who discovered the Higgs boson has died

by time news

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who discovered the Higgs boson or “God particle”, has died

Peter Higgs, the Nobel-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died aged 94.

Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for work he did in 1964 that showed how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass.

After a series of experiments starting in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012—a Nobel Prize shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose 1964 work also contributed directly to the discovery. A Fellow of the Royal Society and an honorary fellow, Higgs spent most of his working life at the University of Edinburgh, which established the Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics in his honor in 2012.

Professor Peter Mathieson, director of the university, said: “A truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination enriched our knowledge of the world around us. His pioneering work has inspired thousands of scientists and his legacy will continue to inspire many others for generations to come.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, said at the time that the standard model of physics, which underpins the scientific understanding of the universe, “is based on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs boson. This particle comes from an invisible field that fills all space. Even when the universe seems empty, this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because by contact with the field the particles gain mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.”

An extremely shy man who disliked fuss, Higgs had left his home for a quiet meal of soup and trout in Leith on the day of the Nobel announcement, only to be stopped on his way home by a former neighbor who broke the news to him . Higgs then characteristically replied: “Who me?”.

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Higgs leaves two sons, Chris and Jonny, and two grandchildren. His estranged wife, Jody, a linguistics lecturer, died in 2008.

What is the Higgs boson

The Higgs boson, a fundamental particle predicted theoretically by Peter Higgs, may hold the key to the question of why elementary particles have masses. In explaining the correlation, my mind runs to the well-known paradox, “If sound cannot travel in a vacuum, why do vacuum cleaners

do they make that much noise?’ This puzzle really touches on a great achievement of modern Physics: the vacuum – or otherwise empty space – is anything but empty. It is literally “noisy” and full of potential particles and force fields.

The origin of mass appears to be intertwined with this phenomenon. In relativity, there is an important difference between massless and massless particles: Every massless particle travels at the speed of light, while massed particles can never reach this speed limit. How is mass obtained in subatomic particles? Higgs proposed that the vacuum contains an “ubiquitous” field that can slow down some (otherwise massless) elementary particles – like a jar of honey slows down a high-speed bullet. Such particles will behave like particles with mass, yet travel at speeds less than that of light. Other particles – such as photons – are immune to the field: they are not slowed down and remain massless.

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