Physicist proposed existence of ‘God particle’
LONDON • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh said Tuesday.
The university, where Higgs was emeritus professor, said he died Monday following a short illness.
Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He theorized there must be a subatomic particle of certain dimension that would explain how other particles — and therefore all the stars and planets in the universe — acquired mass. Without something like this particle, the set of equations physicists use to describe the world, known as the standard model, would not hold together.
His work helps scientists understand one of the most fundamental riddles of the universe: how the Big Bang created something out of nothing 13.8 billion years ago. Without mass from the Higgs, particles could not clump together into the matter we interact with every day.
But it would be almost 50 years before the particle’s existence could be confirmed. In 2012, in one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced they had found a Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider, the $10 billion atom smasher in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the Swiss-french border.
Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.
Born in Newcastle, northeast England, on May 29, 1929, Higgs studied at King’s College, University of London, and was awarded a doctorate in 1954. He spent much of his career at Edinburgh, becoming the Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Scottish university in 1980. He retired in 1996.
One highlight of Higgs’ career came in the 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva where scientists presented in complex terms that the boson had been confirmed. He broke into tears in the stands of a CERN lecture hall.
“Peter was a very touching person. He was so sweet, so warm at the same time. And so always interested in what other people had to say,” Fabiola Gianotti, the CERN director-general told The Associated Press. “Able to listen to other people ... open, and interesting, and interested.”