Renowned physicist Peter Higgs, known for his groundbreaking work in predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, passed away at the age of 94 after a battle with illness. Higgs, who was a professor emeritus at Edinburgh University from 1960 to 1996, was confirmed to have died on April 8.
Born in Newcastle, England in 1929, Higgs received his doctorate from King’s College London in 1954 before embarking on a distinguished career focused on understanding how elementary particles acquire mass. In his seminal paper published in 1964, Higgs proposed the existence of a field now known as the Higgs field that 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.
Higgs’ research revolutionized our understanding of particle physics and earned him numerous accolades throughout his career. In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside François Englert in 2013 for their work on predicting the masses of subatomic particles, he also received numerous awards and honors from various scientific organizations around the world. His contributions to science will continue to inspire future generations of physicists for years to come.
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 this particle, particles like electrons and quarks would not have mass, providing a key piece in unlocking one of nature’s greatest mysteries – how matter gets its mass.
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