Life In Brief

PHYSICIST

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 after a short illness. He was 94.

Higgs predicted the existence of a particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He theorised that there must be a subatomic particle of a 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 equations physicists use to describe the world, known as the standard model, would not hold together.

Higgs’s work helped 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 Organisation for Nuclear Research, announced that they had finally found a Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider, the atom-smasher in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

The collider was designed in large part to find Higgs’s particle. It produces collisions with extraordinarily high energies to mimic some of the conditions present in the trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang.

Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside François Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.

When scientists at Cern announced that the boson had been confirmed. Higgs, a quiet and reserved man, burst into tears in the lecture hall.

“There was an emotion – a kind of vibration – going around in the auditorium,” Fabiola Gianotti, the Cern director-general, said. “That was just a unique moment, a unique experience in a professional life.

“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.”

Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle to Thomas, a BBC radio engineer, and Gertrude (née Coghill). He graduated from Kings College London with a first in physics in 1950, achieving a master’s in 1952 and a PhD in 1954.

After graduating he was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Imperial College London, before returning to Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his career. He retired in 1996.

Higgs was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He was awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1984.

In 1963 he married Jody Williamson, a linguistics lecturer; they divorced in 1972. Their two sons survive him.

Born 29 May 1929 Died 8 April 2024 Jill Lawless