Physicist who solved mystery of the universe
Existence of the ‘God particle’ helped explain how matter formed in wake of the Big Bang
PETER HIGGS 1929-2024
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the “God particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died aged 94.
Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He theorised 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.
Higgs’ work helped scientists understand one of the 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 matter we interact with daily.
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, found a Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider, the atom smasher in a 27km tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
The collider was designed in large part to find Higgs’ particle. It produces collisions with extraordinarily high energies to mimic some of the conditions that were present in the trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang.
Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.
Born in Newcastle, northeast England, Higgs studied at King’s College, University of London, and was awarded a doctorate in 1954. He spent much of his career at Edinburgh University, becoming Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. He retired in 1996.
Edinburgh University vice-chancellor Peter Mathieson said of Higgs: “His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”
Associated Press