The Nobel physicist who came up with the ‘God particle’

Peter Higgs never sought accolades for predicting the particle that underpins the Standard Model of physics. While walking the Scottish Highlands in 1964, the British physicist had a profound insight into why matter exists: The universe, he thought, might be pervaded by an invisible field that drags on particles as they pass through it to give rise to mass. Such a field would have to generate its own particle, and the hunt for the Higgs boson—which would come to be known as the God particle—became an international obsession. Governments spent billions building particle accelerators big enough to generate one. When scientists finally confirmed the existence of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in 2012, Higgs, a famously shy and modest man who had assiduously avoided his growing fame, shed a public tear as he received a standing ovation. He then promptly boarded a flight home, limiting his celebration to a single can of beer. “It’s very nice to be right sometimes,” he said.

Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to a BBC sound engineer and a housewife, Higgs gravitated toward physics while still in grammar school and studied at King’s College London, earning a Ph.D. in 1954. He became a permanent lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 and got involved with Greenpeace and the campaign against nuclear weapons, where he met his wife. But he “dropped out of both when they grew too radical for his taste,” said The New York Times. Instead, he turned his attention to the sticky problem of mass, grounding his theory in complicated mathematical equations, said The Telegraph (U.K.). As his boson became a media sensation, he “regularly pleaded with colleagues to stop” referring to it as the God particle, saying that as an atheist he found it inappropriate and in any case the joke was a poor one.

“More interested in his work than fame,” Higgs turned down a knighthood in 1999, said BBC.com (U.K.). In 2013, the Nobel committee spent more than an hour trying to reach him before giving up and making the announcement that he’d shared the prize in physics. Higgs had been incommunicado because he wanted to postpone the hoopla as long as possible. “It ruined my life,” he said years later. “My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation, and occasionally have a bright idea.”