Peter Higgs, a British physicist and Nobel Prize winner, who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, passed away at the age of 94. His groundbreaking theory explained the origins of mass in the universe and contributed to our understanding of the nature of the universe.
Peter Higgs , as a recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics, speaks in Stockholm following the awards ceremony. Peter Higgs , a British physicist and Nobel Prize winner whose musings on the origins of mass launched a nearly five-decade, multibillion-dollar search for a subatomic particle — later known as the Higgs boson — that was said to hold the keys to understanding the nature of the universe, died April 8 at his home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.Dr.
By the mid-20th century, physicists were closing in on many secrets of the cosmos — Einstein and other scientists now understood gravitation and relativity, and how quantum fields governed the behavior of photons and electrons . But the theories didn’t explain everything the scientists wanted to know about how the world worked at the subatomic level.
Dr. Higgs detailed his calculations in two academic papers. The first was published by Physics Letters, a journal published by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The second was rejected by the journal. One editor scoffed that it was “of no obvious relevance to physics.”Undeterred and realizing he needed to pump up the “sales talk,” Dr. Higgs tweaked the second paper, raising the possibility of not only the mysterious field but also of a particle that was associated with it.
The hunt for the particle became a scientific obsession. Over nearly half a century, governments would spend fortunes building and operating giant particle colliders. This effort gave rise to CERN’s $10 billion machine near Geneva. It was able to produce collisions at energies that scientists thought were high enough to make the boson appear.Dr. Higgs, then retired as a professor, thought it would work. If it didn’t, he told the Times of London, “I should be very, very puzzled.
“Peter Higgs came upon an unfinished jigsaw puzzle at just the right time and defined what the centerpiece should look like,” said theoretical physicist Robert Garisto, managing editor of Physical Review Letters. “Forty-eight years later, they found it.”
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