Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of God particle theory, dies at 94

Confirming the death of the eminent scientist, the University of Edinburgh took to Twitter on the microblogging platform.

Paying tribute to the pioneering physicist, University Principal Professor Peter Mathieson said, “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly brilliant scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us. His pioneering work has inspired thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire future generations.”

Here are 10 unknown facts about the Nobel laureate:

• Peter Higgs discovered the existence of the God particle in 1964 when he was a researcher at the university. His idea was validated almost 50 years later in 2012 by experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. After this discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013.
• According to the BBC, Higgs completed his PhD at King’s College London, but he did not get a job at the college because the job was given to his friend and he went to the University of Edinburgh. His theory of the God particle struggled to find a place in scientific journals because so few people understood it.
• Higgs retired from the University of Edinburgh in 1996 and became Professor Emeritus. However, he continued to observe experiments at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva.
• A plaque commemorating the Professor’s legacy can be found on Roxburgh Street in Edinburgh.
• According to the Guardian, Higgs’ father was a sound engineer at the BBC and was stationed in Birmingham, where he spent his first 11 years. In 1941, during the Second World War, the BBC decided to move its operations to Bristol and the family moved there.
• Higgs was greatly inspired by his father’s collection of mathematics books and this collection enabled him to get far ahead in his class.
• According to the Guardian, Higgs was inspired by ‘spontaneous symmetry’ – the work of Japanese-born theorist and Nobel laureate Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago. Inspired by Nambu’s work, Higgs gave his theory in 1964 and explained how massless particles can give rise to particles with mass (Higgs mechanism).
• Higgs’s scientific paper describing the theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism) was rejected by the editors of Physics Letters, saying it had “no obvious relevance to physics.”
• Higgs suffered from asthma as a child. In an interview with the BBC, he said, “What kind of student was I? Well, I was a SWOT, but my contemporaries allowed me to live without any side effects because my asthma excluded me from sports. So SWAT was kind of a thing to make up for not playing football.”
• Higgs did not like this theory being called “the God particle”. “The name was kind of a joke, and not a very good one,” he said in an interview with the BBC. He later said, “…it’s very confusing.”

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Published: April 10, 2024, 04:40 PM IST