Renowned physicist Peter Higgs, known for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, passed away at the age of 94 after an illness. Higgs, who was a professor emeritus at Edinburgh University where he worked from 1960 to 1996, was confirmed to have died on April 8. His groundbreaking research on predicting the masses of subatomic particles earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 alongside François Englert.
Born in Newcastle, England in 1929, Higgs received his doctorate from King’s College London in 1954 before embarking on a career focused on understanding how elementary particles acquire mass. His 1964 paper proposed the existence of a field, now known as the Higgs field, which interacts with particles to give them mass through the Higgs boson particle. Despite the challenges of detecting the rare and short-lived Higgs boson, scientists were able to confirm its existence in 2012 using the Large Hadron Collider.
The discovery of the Higgs boson confirmed a crucial component of the standard model of particle physics, often referred to as the “God particle” due to its role in explaining the mass of other particles and natural forces. Without the Higgs boson, particles like electrons and quarks would not have mass, providing a key piece in the puzzle of understanding the universe at a subatomic level.