 "Peter Higgs passes away: The ‘shy man’ behind the God Particle")
The world of science received crushing news on Tuesday when it was announced that British physicist Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94. The physics Nobel laureate had come up with the idea of the Higgs boson particle, which also was known as the ‘God Particle’.
The University of Edinburgh announcing Higgs’ passing away said that he died on Monday at his home. “He passed away peacefully at home on 8 April (Monday) following a short illness. Paying tribute to the physicist, the Scottish university where he had been a professor for nearly five decades said that he was a “a great teacher and mentor, inspiring generations of young scientists”.
Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal and vice-chancellor, said: “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual — a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.
“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”
But who was Peter Higgs? What do we know of the God particle that he theorised years ago in 1964? Here’s what we know.
Early life of Peter Higgs
Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in north-east England and attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol, where his father was stationed as an engineer for the BBC during World War II. At school in Bristol, he was a brilliant student who won prizes for his science work — though it was in chemistry, not physics.
He later enrolled as a physics student at King’s College London, where he also did a PhD on the theory of molecules. However, he lost out to a job at the college by his friend and then went to went to the University of Edinburgh in 1960 and remained there until his retirement in 1996.
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More ShortsHiggs and the God particle
It was in 1964 that the ‘gifted scientist’ had his Eureka moment when he predicted the existence of a new particle — the so-called Higgs boson — in 1964. His theory related to how subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.
The Edinburgh University said his 1964 paper demonstrated how “elemental particles achieved mass through the existence of a new sub-atomic particle” which became known as the Higgs boson.
When asked about his work on the ‘god particle’, Higgs had told New Scientist in 2017 that the moniker was “an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology”.
It was in 2012 when Higgs was 83 years of age that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland’s Bern finally confirmed the prediction Higgs made all those years ago. In fact, a Sky News report states that the physicist wiped away a tear when the findings confirmed his theory. “I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge,” he had then said, according to a Sky News report.
When asked by journalists how he felt following the findings at CERN, he said: “It’s very nice to be right sometimes.”
He added: “At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime because we knew so little at the beginning about where this particle might be in mass, and therefore how high an energy machine would have to go before it could be discovered.
“It’s been a very long development over the years of the technology of building machines at higher and higher energy, and the [Large Hadron Collider] is the one which has been energetic enough and also intense enough in terms of the particle beams to do it.
“It’s been a long wait but it might have been even longer, I might not have been still around.”
The Higgs boson, or god particle, is said to have caused the “Big Bang” that created the universe many years ago. Scientists also note that since the Higgs boson has the role to generate the mass of other particles and the fact that dark matter can primarily be detected through its mass, the Higgs boson can be a unique portal to finding signs of dark matter.
Higgs wins the Nobel
In the following year, 2013, Higgs won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory. A shy man, he wished to steer clear of publicity.
Notably, in an interview on the Nobel prize website, he recounted how, on the morning that the 2013 Nobel announcement was due, he had anticipated media attention and taken steps to avoid it.
He left his house in Edinburgh, where he was emeritus professor at the university, and went for a walk around the harbour, and then to lunch and an art exhibition. On his way home, a former neighbour congratulated him on his award. “I said: ‘What award?’” he recalled, chuckling.
Post winning the Nobel, Higgs remained wary of people approaching him for autographs. He was also uncomfortable with his name alone being linked to the particle, saying the publicity had “neglected” to give credit to the other people involved.
Tributes pour in
Following the demise of Higgs, tributes poured in from people belonging to different walks of life.
Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf called Higgs a “visionary whose idea, and its discovery some 48 years later, is transforming our understanding of the Universe”.
Alan Barr, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford told the BBC: “He proposed the existence of a field that pervades the entire universe, from mass to particles from electrons to top quarks. He was also a true gentleman, humble and polite, always giving due credit to others, and gently encouraging future generations of scientists and scholars.”
Particle physicist John Ellis from King’s College London, who has spent most of his career at CERN, told Physics World that “a giant of particle physics has left us”. “Without his theory, atoms could not exist and radioactivity would be a force as strong as electricity and magnetism,” adds Ellis. “His prediction of the existence of the particle that bears his name was a deep insight, and its discovery at CERN in 2012 was a crowning moment that confirmed his understanding of the way the Universe works.”
With inputs from agencies
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