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Peter Higgs, Who Proposed The Existence Of The ‘God Particle’ Dead At 94

Peter Higgs, Who Proposed The Existence Of The 'God Particle' Dead At 94 | GlobalCurrent24.com

University of Edinburgh emeritus professor, Peter Higgs, who proposed ‘God Particle’ dead at 94.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who suggested the existence of the so-called “God particle” that helped explain how matter created after the Big Bang, died at the age of 94, the University of Edinburgh announced Tuesday.

Higgs, an emeritus professor at the institution, died on Monday after a short illness.

Higgs predicted the presence of a new particle, known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He proposed that there must be a subatomic particle of a certain dimension that might explain how other particles — and so all the stars and planets in the cosmos — gained mass. Without this particle, the standard model, which physicists use to describe the world, would not hold together.

Higgs’ work helps scientists solve one of the universe’s most fundamental mysteries: how the Big Bang generated stuff out of nothing 13.8 billion years ago. Without Higgs mass, particles would not be able to clump together to form the matter with which we interact every day.

However, it would take almost 50 years to prove the particle’s existence. In 2012, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they had finally discovered a Higgs boson using the Large Hardron Collider, a $10 billion atom smasher located in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.

The collider was built in significant part to discover the Higgs particle. It creates collisions with extremely high energies in order to simulate some of the circumstances that existed trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang.

Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution, together with François Englert of Belgium, who independently developed the same hypothesis.

Edinburgh University Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson described Higgs, born in Newcastle, as “a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.”

“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”

Higgs was born on May 29, 1929, in Newcastle, northeast England. He attended King’s College, University of London, and received his doctorate in 1954. He spent the majority of his career at Edinburgh University, where he was appointed Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. He retired in 1996.

One of Higgs’ career highlights was a 2013 presentation at CERN in Geneva, where scientists announced that the boson had been verified in sophisticated words based on statistical analysis that most laypeople could not understand. He burst into tears while wiping down his spectacles in the stands of a CERN lecture auditorium.

“There was an emotion — a kind of vibration — going around in the auditorium,” the CERN director-general, Fabiola Gianotti, told The Associated Press. “That was just a unique moment in my professional life.”

“Peter was a very touching individual. He was very nice and warm at the same time. “And I was always interested in what other people had to say,” she explained.

According to Joel Goldstein of the University of Bristol’s School of Physics, “Peter Higgs was a quiet and modest man, who never seemed comfortable with the fame he achieved, even though this work underpins the entire modern theoretical framework of particle physics.”