Peter Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle that came to be named after him (and God), sparking a half-century worldwide, multibillion-dollar search for it, and in 2012 culminated in champagne and annual Nobel Prizes. He then passed away on Monday. He was 94 years old.
His death was announced by the University of Edinburgh, where he was emeritus professor. No further details were disclosed. Dr Higgs lived in Edinburgh.
In 1964, Dr. Higgs, then a 35-year-old assistant professor at the same university, suggested the existence of a new particle that explained how other particles acquire mass. The Higgs boson, also known as the “God Particle,” is a keystone of a family of theories known as the Standard Model. This theory encapsulates all of humanity's previous knowledge about elementary particles and their power to shape nature and the universe.
Dr. Higgs was a humble man who eschewed the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. He didn't have a television, didn't use email or a cell phone. For years, he has relied on his colleague Alan Walker, professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh, to act as his “digital guide dog,” in the words of his former student.
Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he walked into the auditorium of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and received a standing ovation upon hearing that his particle had finally been discovered. The whole world watched as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away his tears in a webcast from his lab.
“It's just unbelievable that this happened in my lifetime,” he said in a webcast.
Dr Higgs declined to attend the after-party and immediately flew home, celebrating with a can of London Pride beer on the plane. CERN, whose control room is lined with shelves of empty champagne bottles commemorating great moments, asked if they could get the cans, but Higgs had already thrown them away.
Peter Ware Higgs was born on May 29, 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the son of Thomas Ware Higgs, a sound engineer for the BBC, and Gertrude Maud (Coghill) Higgs, a household manager. Born as. He grew up in Bristol.
His interest in physics was fine-tuned while attending the same Cotham Grammar School as the great British theorist Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics (he had no mother). His theory, which explains the forces of nature as a catch-all of force-carrying energy bits called bosons, would be the same field in which Dr. Higgs would find fame.
At the age of 17, Peter moved to City of London School, where he studied mathematics. A year later he enrolled at King's College in London, graduating in 1947 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. He won the award in 1954 for his molecular and thermal research.
After temporary research positions at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, and University College London, he took up a permanent position as a lecturer in Edinburgh in 1960. Dr. Higgs fell in love with the city he had often escaped to during his college years. Hitchhiking trip to the Scottish Highlands.
During that time, he was also politically active in campaigns for nuclear disarmament and Greenpeace. However, he dropped out of both because they became too extreme for his tastes.
He met and fell in love with fellow activist Jody Williamson during the disarmament movement. They married in 1963. She passed away in her 2008 year. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
In Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs changed his research direction from chemistry and molecules to his first love, elementary particles.
Edinburgh is the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who achieved the first great unification of physics by showing that electricity and magnetism are different manifestations of the same force, the electromagnetism that makes up light. By showing that Maxwell's electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different aspects of the Earth, it is Higgs' destiny to push physics to the next step, a theory that can be written on a T-shirt. Dew. Same.
But, as is often the case with the zigzagging progress of science, that wasn't what Dr. Higgs had in mind.
“At the time,” he recalled in an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, “the idea was to solve strong forces.”
A strong force holds the atomic nuclei together. According to theory, the particles that carry that force, or bosons, should be massless, similar to the photons that carry light. But while light traverses the universe, strong forces barely travel through the nuclei of atoms. According to quantum laws, a particle carrying light should weigh approximately the same as an entire proton.
So how did a powerful force transporter become so huge?
Higgs took an idea used by Philip W. Anderson of Princeton University to explain superconductivity and suggested that the universe is filled with an invisible energy field, cosmic molasses. This field acts on any particles that try to move through it, imbuing them with what we perceive as mass, like an entourage clinging to a celebrity to get to the bar. Call it spooky action everywhere.
Under some circumstances, parts of this field could flake off and emerge as new particles, he noted.
But his first paper on the subject was rejected, so he rewrote it, as he calls it, “with some spice” and added a new paragraph at the end highlighting his prediction of a new particle, later called the Higgs boson. . Boson.
It turns out that François Englert and Robert Blaut of the Free University of Bruxelles out-printed him by seven weeks with a similar idea. Soon after, he was joined by three more physicists. I'm Tom Kibble from Imperial College London. Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester. Gerald Guralnik of Brown University also weighed in.
“They were the first, but I didn't know until Nambu told me,” Higgs said in an interview, referring to the magazine's editor, University of Chicago physicist and Nobel Prize winner Nachiro Nambu. ” he said. There was no Internet back then, he said, and his voice trailed off, suggesting that if he had seen their papers, he probably wouldn't have written his own.
“At first, we didn't know if it would be important,” Dr. Higgs continued. Neither did the others.
In fact, the strong force theory that Dr. Higgs began researching has since taken a different direction. But his paper and particles would be decisive for the so-called weak force.
Unbeknownst to Dr. Higgs, American physicist Sheldon Glashow had proposed a theory in 1961 that integrated the weak force and the electromagnetic force; I had the same problem of how to explain why the cause was weak. It doesn't have no mass.
Dr. Higgs' field of magic would have been just the ticket, but he and Dr. Glashow didn't know each other's work.
One of Dr Higgs' duties as a new professor in Edinburgh in 1960 was to provide daily refreshments to the Scottish Summer Conference held there. Dr. Glashaw and his friends, who were present, hid the wine bottle provided by Dr. Higgs in a grandfather clock, then returned and stayed up all night to drain the wine and unify the electric weak. were talking about.
Meanwhile, Dr. Higgs was in bed. “I didn't know they were stealing my wine,” he said in an interview.
Bosons made headlines in 1967 when Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin made them the linchpin for unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. The issue became an even bigger topic in 1971 when Belgian theorist Gerald Hooft proved that the whole scheme made mathematical sense.
According to Dr. Higgs, Fermilab physicist Benjamin Lee, who later died in a car accident, named the Higgs boson during a conference around 1972, and Dr. Higgs' paper was probably the first in Dr. Weinberg's paper. This may be because it was cited.
The name stuck not only to the particle but also to the molasses field that produced it and the mechanism by which that field imparted mass to other particles. This puzzled Dr. Higgs and somewhat annoyed other theorists.
“For a while, I called it the 'ABEGHHKH mechanism,' dragging the names of all the theorists who contributed to this theory (Anderson, Braut, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs),” Dr. Higgs said. I remembered with a laugh. , kibble and 't Hooft).
Interest in bosons came and went in waves. Dr. Higgs' first interview took place in 1988 when CERN launched a new accelerator he named LEP for the Large Electron-Positron Collider. One of his main goals was to find the Higgs boson. Despite claims by some scientists that they had seen traces of the Higgs boson, there was another round when LEP was about to be shut down in 2000.
Dr. Higgs was skeptical. “They were pushing the car beyond its limits,” he recalled.
By then he had given up on research, concluding that high-energy particle physics had simply exceeded his limits.
He was trying to work on a trendy new theory called supersymmetry that would further unify forces, but “I kept making stupid mistakes,” he says. In fact, he later told the BBC that if he had not known that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, he probably would have been fired long ago due to his lack of productivity. Ta.
In recent years, Dr Higgs lived in a fifth-floor apartment in the historic New Town area of central Edinburgh. He is just around the corner from the birthplace of the great Scottish theorist Maxwell, who grew up in the area.
Even before the Nobel Prize cemented his place in history, he became one of the city's tourist attractions, a walking monument to science, and in 2011 won the Edinburgh Prize for 'outstanding contribution to the city'. was awarded.
Dr. Higgs continued to teach until his retirement in 1996, but his lack of research allowed him to escape the strife and anger that resulted from the discovery of bosons. He turned down an offer of knighthood in 1999, but was appointed a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.
The following year, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with Professor Englert, joining his immortal idols Dirac and Maxwell. But getting into fights was never his thing. On the day the physics prize was scheduled to be announced, he decided it was a good time to leave town.
Unfortunately his car didn't start. Stuck in town, he decided to go to lunch. But on the way, a neighbor catches him and tells him that he has won the prize.
“What's the prize?” he joked.