Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson particle, has died at the age of 94 due to a blood disease. The particle he came up with – and showed how it could help give some matter mass – won him the 2013 Nobel Prize. The Higgs boson is informally known 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 study didn’t attract any attention in scientific journals, mostly because few people understood the concept, however. It was just a theory at the time, but it sparked a 50-year race to prove that the Higgs boson particle actually existed.
Scientists were rewarded handsomely in 2012 thanks to physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. After four years of experiments, the Higgs boson particle was finally discovered, proving his idea and adding a major piece of the puzzle to the knowledge base of particle physics known as the Standard Model.
In fact, modern theoretical physicists have postulated the existence of up to five Higgs boson particles, which populate what is now known as the Higgs field. Scientists hope to one day use the Higgs boson to find evidence of the elusive dark matter.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the Nobel Prize, wrote about the importance of his discovery. “Even if the universe appears empty, this field still exists. Without it, we would not exist because particles gain mass through contact with the field.” The Nobel Prize winner is the Belgian theoretical physicist Francois François Englert, whose work in 1964 contributed to this discovery.
“At first I didn’t know if I would find anything in my lifetime,” Higgs once said. He leaves behind two sons, Chris and Jonny, a daughter-in-law, Suzanne, and two grandchildren. His ex-wife Jody is a linguist. Professor, died in 2008.
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