The physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson and received the Nobel Prize after his prediction was confirmed, has died at the age of 94. As reported today in a statement by the University of Edinburgh, where he was an emeritus professor, Higgs died “peacefully at his home on Monday, April 8 after a brief illness.”
In 1964, Higgs predicted the existence of an essential particle in the Standard Model of physics, the main theory that explains the Universe as we understand it – although it is an incomplete theory, since it does not explain dark matter or energy. But it took almost 50 years for the existence of the so-called Higgs boson to be confirmed in the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, built with the purpose of finding said particle.
Born in Newcastle (United Kingdom) in 1929, Higgs spent almost his entire career at the University of Edinburgh. He became interested in the enigma of why most, but not all, particles have mass, something that in the 1960s had no explanation. He proposed that they acquire mass by interacting with a field that permeates all of space.
According to the Higgs mechanism, in the same way that there is an electromagnetic field on which the electromagnetic properties of particles depend, there is a field on which their mass depends. And only those particles that interact with the so-called Higgs field have mass (photons, for example, have no mass), in the same way that only those that interact with the electromagnetic field have an electric charge.
Since all quantum force fields have an associated particle, if a Higgs field existed, a Higgs boson had to also exist. Detecting this boson would be the way to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs field – and not just the boson itself -, without which the Standard Model theory would have collapsed. Hence, physicists around the world embarked on the collective effort to search for the boson, which was finally discovered in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
After that discovery, Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 along with the Belgian François Englert, who had also predicted the mechanism that gives mass to particles at the same time.
Curiously, the scientific article in which Higgs proposed his theoretical model in 1964 was rejected by the editors of the journal Physics Letters, who considered it “without obvious relevance to physics.” The physicist modified it slightly and sent it to the journal Physical Review Letters, which published it.
Higgs was a scientist committed to pacifism and environmental protection. He was an activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as was his wife Jody Williamson, with whom he had two children, but he left the movement when it opposed the production of nuclear energy, and not just weapons. nuclear. He was also a member of Greenpeace, but left the NGO when it opposed genetically modified foods.
Peter Mathieson, vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement that Peter Higgs has been “an extraordinary person: a truly talented scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world around us. His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists”.
