Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson particle, 94 years old due to blood disorder. His work proposing the particle and showing how it helps give mass to matter won him a Noble prize in 2013. The Higgs boson is unofficially referred to as the God particle after a book. .
Higgs proposed this idea in the early 1960s as an attempt to explain why atoms have mass in the first place. The research gained no traction in scientific journals, primarily because few people understood the concept, but . It was just a theory at the time, but it led to a 50-year race to prove that the Higgs boson particle actually existed.
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland lost their wages in 2012. It took four years of experiments, but finally the Higgs boson particle was discovered, proving his ideas and adding a huge puzzle to the corpus of particle physics knowledge known as the Standard Model.
In fact, modern theoretical physicists have postulated the existence of up to five Higgs boson particles that populate what is now called the Higgs field. Using the Higgs boson, scientists hope to one day find evidence for dark matter.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the Nobel Prize, wrote about the importance of his discovery. . “Even though the universe seems empty, this field is there. Without it, we wouldn’t exist, because particles gain mass as a result of contact with the field.” The Nobel Prize was shared with the Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert, whose work in 1964 contributed to the discovery.
Higgs once said: “At first I had no idea whether there would be a discovery in my lifetime.” He is survived by two sons, Chris and Johnny, daughter-in-law Suzanne, and two grandchildren. His ex-wife, Jody, is a linguist. professor, died in 2008.
This article contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission if you click on such a link and make a purchase.
