2024-04-10 13:53:37
In 1964, while working as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs made a prediction that had a huge impact on the world of physics: he proposed the existence of a field surrounding the Universe that gave particles mass moments after the Big Bang. This field was supposed to be associated with its own particle, which was later named the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson became a key prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics, dubbed the “God particle” by Mr. Higgs himself in 2017 called the interview “an unfortunate mixture of theoretical physics and bad theology”.
After years of searching for the Higgs boson, in 2012 In Switzerland, at the CERN particle physics laboratory, it was finally discovered. A year later, Mr. Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize, one of many prizes and awards he received for his work.
The discovery of the Higgs boson is usually cited as the Large Hadron Collider‘s most important achievement, but it also marked the beginning of a strange era in particle physics – after finding all the particles predicted by the Standard Model, what happens next? Mr. Higgs himself hoped that by using hadron colliders we would be able to link particle physics with cosmology and the search for dark matter – but these questions remain open to this day.
Even in 1996 after retirement, Mr. Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and collaborate with colleagues and students. He often spoke of supersymmetry, a system of physics in which every known particle has a corresponding partner with a different spin. If we really live in a supersymmetric Universe, many more particles should be discovered, writes New Scientist.
2024-04-10 13:53:37