Peter Higgs, physicist behind Higgs boson particle, recalled as 'truly gifted scientist' | 24CA News
Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped clarify how matter shaped after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh stated Tuesday.
The college, the place Higgs was emeritus professor, stated he died Monday “peacefully at home following a short illness.”
Higgs predicted the existence of a brand new particle — the so-called Higgs boson — in 1964. But it might be nearly 50 years earlier than the particle’s existence might be confirmed on the Large Hadron Collider.
Higgs’s principle associated to how subatomic particles which might be the constructing blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central a part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.
Edinburgh University stated his groundbreaking 1964 paper demonstrated how “elemental particles achieved mass through the existence of a new sub-atomic particle″ that became known as the Higgs boson.
A major breakthrough
In 2012, in one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they had finally found a Higgs boson using the $10-billion US particle collider built in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.
Edinburgh University Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson said Higgs, who was born in Newcastle, was “a outstanding particular person — a very gifted scientist whose imaginative and prescient and creativeness have enriched our information of the world that surrounds us.”
“His pioneering work has motivated hundreds of scientists, and his legacy will proceed to encourage many extra for generations to return.”
Riddle of the Bing Bang
Higgs’s work helps solve one of the most fundamental riddles of the universe: how the Big Bang created something out of nothing 13.7 billion years ago.
Finding corroboration wasn’t easy. It took more than two decades, thousands of scientists and mountains of data from trillions of colliding protons.
And it needed the world’s biggest atom smasher CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to produce the extreme surge of energies simulating those one trillionth to two trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.
One highlight of Higgs’s illustrious career came during the 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva where scientists presented in complex terms — unfathomable to most laypeople and based on statistical analysis — that the boson has been confirmed. He broke into tears, wiping down his glasses in the stands of the lecture hall.
Born in Newcastle, northeast England on May 29, 1929, Higgs studied at King’s College, University of London, and was awarded a PhD 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.
Higgs received honorary degrees from more than a dozen universities, including Edinburgh (1998), Swansea (2008) Cambridge (2012), St Andrews and Manchester (2013).
In 2013 he was appointed a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II.
