Peter Higgs: Physicist who theorised the Higgs boson has died aged 94

Groundbreaking theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died at age 94. Higgs’s work explaining how elementary particles get their mass received him the Nobel prize in 2013 and shaped a key ingredient in the commonplace mannequin of particle physics. He died in his dwelling in Edinburgh, UK, on 8 April after a brief sickness.

In 1964, whereas working as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs made a prediction that will show to have a huge effect on the world of physics: he postulated the existence of a subject suffusing the universe that gave mass to particles moments after the large bang. This subject could be related to a particle of its personal, which was later named the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson went on to turn out to be a foundational prediction of the commonplace mannequin of particle physics, nicknamed the “god particle” – a moniker that Higgs himself known as “an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology” in a 2017 interview with New Scientist.

After years of looking for proof of the Higgs boson, it was lastly found at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland in 2012. A yr later, Higgs was awarded the Nobel prize, one in every of many prizes and honours he acquired for his work.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is usually cited as the most consequential work of the Large Hadron Collider, nevertheless it additionally marked the starting of a wierd time in particle physics – with all of the particles predicted by the commonplace mannequin discovered, what’s subsequent? Higgs himself hoped that we might have the ability to use colliders to attach particle physics with cosmology and the seek for darkish matter, however these questions stay open.

Even after his retirement in 1996, Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and to collaborate with colleagues and college students. He spoke usually about supersymmetry, a framework for physics wherein every recognized particle has a corresponding associate with a distinct spin. If we do reside in a supersymmetric universe, there must be many extra particles on the market to find.