THE CRITICAL MASS

Peter Higgs changed human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe

WHY DO SOME particles have mass? As a young lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, the thought had consumed Peter Higgs. The British physicist’s research into the flavour symmetries of particle physics threw up a tantalising possibility — the presence of a particle that accounted for how elementary particles acquire mass. The first paper he wrote on it was promptly rejected — it was thought to have no bearing on particle physics — but Higgs persisted. He resurrected the paper again with additions in 1964. This time, not only did it pass muster, it also concurred with parallel research. The Higgs boson or “the God particle” would revolutionise the discipline of Physics and human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. It would also earn Higgs, who died on April 8 at the age of 94, a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

Higgs’ discovery validated the Standard Model, the present framework for accessing the building blocks of the universe and paved the way for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, the mechanism behind the particle’s existence. It continues to influence critical research into areas such as Dark Matter and the unification of forces, the latter first broached by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s.

The Nobel that Higgs shared with Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert would have seemed to be a natural culmination of his pioneering work but before that there was a tease of a wait of nearly five decades for the elusive Higgs boson. In 2012, scientists at CERN in Geneva finally managed a breakthrough, thanks to the powerful Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator built at a cost of $10billion. Higgs had been specially invited for the occasion. His reaction to it, like most things outside of the lab, was self-effacing: He wiped a tear and told the assembled scientists that he was just grateful that the discovery had come in his lifetime before catching a flight back home.