Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped clarify how matter shaped after the Massive Bang, has died at age 94, the College of Edinburgh mentioned Tuesday.
The college, the place Higgs was emeritus professor, mentioned he died Monday “peacefully at residence following a brief sickness.”
Higgs predicted the existence of a brand new particle — the so-called Higgs boson — in 1964. However it could be nearly 50 years earlier than the particle’s existence may very well be confirmed on the Massive Hadron Collider.
Higgs’s concept associated to how subatomic particles which can be the constructing blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central a part of the so-called Normal Mannequin, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.
Edinburgh College mentioned his groundbreaking 1964 paper demonstrated how “elemental particles achieved mass by means of the existence of a brand new sub-atomic particle″ that turned generally known as the Higgs boson.
A significant breakthrough
In 2012, in one of many largest breakthroughs in physics in many years, scientists at CERN, the European Group for Nuclear Analysis, introduced that they’d lastly discovered a Higgs boson utilizing the $10-billion US particle collider inbuilt a 27-kilometre tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.
Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently got here up with the identical concept.
Edinburgh College Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson mentioned Higgs, who was born in Newcastle, was “a outstanding particular person — a very gifted scientist whose imaginative and prescient and creativeness have enriched our data of the world that surrounds us.”
“His pioneering work has motivated 1000’s of scientists, and his legacy will proceed to encourage many extra for generations to return.”
Riddle of the Bing Bang
Higgs’s work helps clear up some of the elementary riddles of the universe: how the Massive Bang created one thing out of nothing 13.7 billion years in the past.
Discovering corroboration wasn’t straightforward. It took greater than 20 years, 1000’s of scientists and mountains of knowledge from trillions of colliding protons.
And it wanted the world’s largest atom smasher CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider to provide the intense surge of energies simulating these one trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Massive Bang.
One spotlight of Higgs’s illustrious profession got here through the 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva the place scientists introduced in advanced phrases — unfathomable to most laypeople and primarily based on statistical evaluation — that the boson has been confirmed. He broke into tears, wiping down his glasses within the stands of the lecture corridor.
Born in Newcastle, northeast England on Might 29, 1929, Higgs studied at King’s School, College of London, and was awarded a PhD in 1954.
He spent a lot of his profession at Edinburgh, changing into the Private Chair of Theoretical Physics on the Scottish college in 1980. He retired in 1996.
Higgs acquired honorary levels from greater than a dozen universities, together with Edinburgh (1998), Swansea (2008) Cambridge (2012), St Andrews and Manchester (2013).
In 2013 he was appointed a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II.
