Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped clarify how matter shaped after the Large Bang, has died at age 94, the College of Edinburgh mentioned Tuesday.
The college, the place Higgs was emeritus professor, mentioned he died Monday “peacefully at residence following a brief sickness.”
Higgs predicted the existence of a brand new particle — the so-called Higgs boson — in 1964. However it might be nearly 50 years earlier than the particle’s existence might be confirmed on the Massive Hadron Collider.
Higgs’ concept associated to how subatomic particles which can be the constructing blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central a part of the so-called Normal Mannequin, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.
Edinburgh College mentioned his groundbreaking 1964 paper demonstrated how “elemental particles achieved mass by means of the existence of a brand new sub-atomic particle″ which turned often known as the Higgs boson.
In 2012, in one of many greatest breakthroughs in physics in many years, scientists at CERN, the European Group for Nuclear Analysis, introduced that they’d lastly discovered a Higgs boson utilizing the $10 billion particle collider in-built a 27-kilometre tunnel underneath the Swiss-French border.
Higgs gained the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently got here up with the identical concept.
Edinburgh College Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson mentioned Higgs, who was born in Newcastle, was “a outstanding particular person – a very gifted scientist whose imaginative and prescient and creativeness have enriched our information of the world that surrounds us.”
“His pioneering work has motivated hundreds of scientists, and his legacy will proceed to encourage many extra for generations to come back.”
Higgs’ work helps remedy one of the vital basic riddles of the universe: how the Large Bang created one thing out of nothing 13.7 billion years in the past.
Discovering corroboration wasn’t straightforward. It took greater than 20 years, hundreds of scientists and mountains of information from trillions of colliding protons.
And it wanted the world’s greatest atom smasher CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider to supply the intense surge of energies simulating these 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Large Bang.
One spotlight of Higgs’ illustrious profession got here throughout the 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva the place scientists introduced in complicated phrases — unfathomable to most laypeople and based mostly on statistical evaluation — that the boson has been confirmed. He broke into tears, wiping down his glasses within the stands of the lecture corridor.
Born in Newcastle, northeast England on Could 29, 1929, Higgs studied at King’s School, College of London, and was awarded a PhD in 1954. He spent a lot of his profession at Edinburgh, changing into the Private Chair of Theoretical Physics on the Scottish college in 1980. He retired in 1996.
Higgs obtained honorary levels from greater than a dozen universities, together with Edinburgh in 1998, Swansea in 2008, Cambridge in 2012 and St. Andrews and Manchester in 2013.
In 2013 he was appointed a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II.
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