(Reuters) — Physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of an undiscovered particle in the universe changed science and was supported by a Nobel Prize-winning discovery half a century later, has died at the age of 94, the University of Edinburgh said on Tuesday.
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN research center near Geneva was widely hailed as the biggest advance in knowledge about the universe in more than 30 years, moving physics toward ideas that were previously science fiction.
“For me personally, this is just confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be right in some way,” the British scientist told Reuters at the time.
“At first, I had no expectations of being alive when it happened.”
The University of Edinburgh, where Higgs held a professorship for many years, said he died peacefully on Monday at his home after a short illness.
Professor Sir Peter Matheson, Provost and Vice-Chancellor of the University, said: “Peter Higgs was an extraordinary person, a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination enriched our knowledge of the world around us.”
Higgs described himself as a “misfit” in the school physics laboratory and initially preferred mathematics and chemistry. But he was inspired by quantum physicist Paul Dirac, who attended the same school and specialized in theoretical physics.
What would become known as the Higgs boson would solve the mystery of where many fundamental particles get their mass: by interacting with the invisible “Higgs field” that permeates space.
This interaction, known as the Brot-Englert-Higgs mechanism, led to the Higgs and Belgian François Englert receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Robert Brot, Englert's collaborator, died in 2011.
“unbelievable”
In 1964, the first Higgs paper on the model was rejected by CERN's academic physics journal as having “no relation to physics.” Their revised paper, although published weeks after Englert and Brot's research, was the first to clearly predict the existence of a new particle.
“Over the weekend… I gradually realized that I knew two things had to come together,” he said. “I had to go back to my office on Monday and make sure I wasn't wrong about that.”
This tantalizing insight promised to fill a gap in the Standard Model – the basic theoretical framework of physics – if only the existence of the particle could be proven.
For nearly three decades, physicists at CERN and Fermilab in Chicago have replicated the “Big Bang” by colliding particles, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Higgs boson in the resulting mini-bursts.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider finally proved to be the hammer needed to crack a nut, and in 2012, two experiments independently found the Higgs boson.
Englert and Higgs were in a packed CERN hall to hear the discovery announcement, while hundreds of thousands watched online.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” Rolf Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said to applause.
Higgs was visibly in tears, telling his fellow researchers: “This is an unbelievable thing to happen in my lifetime.”
“What's the prize?”
The Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but its full understanding is still a work in progress. Its discovery allowed theorists to focus their attention on the large portion of the universe that remained unexplained, as well as on esoteric ideas such as the possibility of parallel universes.
As an atheist, Higgs hated the nickname “God particle,” which headlines often applied to the boson that bears his name.
He had strong opinions about the rights and wrongs of science and abandoned the nuclear disarmament movement when it began campaigning against the use of nuclear energy.
In 1962, Higgs married Jody Williamson, an American linguist and nuclear disarmament activist, who died in 2008. They had two children.
Higgs was modest about his accomplishments and media-shy. In an interview on the Nobel Prize website, he recounted how, on the morning of the 2013 Nobel Prize announcement, he anticipated media attention and took steps to avoid it.
He left his home in Edinburgh, where he was an honorary professor at the university, and went for a walk along the harbour, followed by lunch and an art exhibition.
On his way home, one of his former neighbors congratulated him on his award.
“I said, ‘What’s the prize?’” he recalls, laughing.
(Reporting by Robert Evans and Tom Miles) – Additional reporting by Farouk Suleiman – Prepared by Muhammad for the Arabic Bulletin – Prepared by Muhammad for the Arabic Bulletin Editing by Praveen Char and Mark Heinrich
