He wrote the theory of the god particle, which is believed to add mass to particles such as electrons and quarks. They conducted experiments at CERN and proved the existence of that particle. He received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his work on this subject. British scientist Peter Higgs, who gave his name to the Higgs boson, died at the age of 94.
The British physicist was among the scientists who developed the theory explaining why everything in the Universe has mass in the 1960s.
This scientific breakthrough was made approximately 50 years later.
The existence of the Higgs boson was detected as a result of experiments carried out in 2012 in the giant device called the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, a year after this development.
Announcing the news of his death, the University of Edinburgh said that Higgs "enriched our knowledge of the world around us with his vision and imagination."
The Higgs boson is an energy field. It gives mass to other fundamental particles of the universe, such as electrons and quarks.
The Higgs boson also became known as the "God particle". Because the process of gaining mass is likened to the Big Bang, which gave rise to the current universe.
Who is Peter Higgs?
Peter Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Elswick, England, to a Scottish mother and an English father who worked as a sound engineer for the BBC. Higgs had to live at home due to asthma, his family constantly moving due to his father's job, and World War II.
Later his father moved to Bedford. He stayed with his mother in Bristol, where he spent most of his childhood. He attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol between the ages of 12 and 17 (1941-1946). He was influenced by Paul Dirac, a former graduate of the school and also one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
In 1946, 17-year-old Higgs started attending a City of London school, concentrating on mathematics. Afterward, he started studying at King's College London in 1947. He graduated with first-class honors in 1950, at the age of 21. He completed his master's degree in 1952. He completed his doctorate in 1954 under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins with his thesis titled "Problems related to the theory of molecular vibrations".
He held a senior research position at the University of Edinburgh between 1954 and 1956. He held various positions at Imperial College London and University College London and also taught mathematics temporarily. He started working in quantum field theory in 1956. In 1960, he returned to the University of Edinburgh to take up a position as a lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics.
Above, I have superficially explained what Higgs experienced until 1960, but the real event starts now. Nearly half a century ago, also in the 1960s, Peter Higgs and some other physicists were trying to understand the origin of a fundamental physical property: mass. You can think of mass as the weight of an object or, a little more precisely, as the resistance it offers to a change in its motion.