The University of Edinburgh, where physicist Peter Higgs held an honorary professorship for many years, confirmed that he passed away peacefully on April 8 at home after a short illness.
Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Chancellor of the university, said: "Peter Higgs was an outstanding individual, a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world around us."
“His pioneering work inspired thousands of scientists and his legacy will continue to inspire generations to come,” said Professor Mathieson.
Higgs, however, described himself as “incompetent” in the physics lab at school, and admitted that he initially preferred maths and chemistry. But inspired by quantum physicist Paul Dirac, who had attended the same school, he switched to theoretical physics.
Physicist Peter Higgs is an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh. Photo: AP
He first predicted and proposed the existence of the Higgs particle (or Higgs boson, often referred to as the "God particle") in 1964. He theorized that there must be a subatomic particle of a certain size that could explain how other particles and all the stars in the universe have mass.
Without the mass of the Higgs boson, particles could not coalesce into the matter we interact with every day, the professor claimed in 1964. And without something like this particle, the set of laws that physicists use to describe the world, known as the “Standard Model,” would not hold together.
If the existence of the Higgs boson is proven, the basic theoretical framework of the Standard Model could be explained and help scientists understand one of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe: The Big Bang created something out of nothing 13.8 billion years ago.
For nearly 30 years, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Fermilab laboratory in Chicago have been recreating the Big Bang by smashing particles together in the hope of detecting the existence of the Higgs boson.
Finally, in 2012, scientists at CERN announced that they had found the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is a massive particle accelerator designed specifically to find the Higgs boson. It creates collisions at extremely high energies to simulate some of the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
This work shows how bosons help hold the universe together and give mass to fundamental particles, which are essential for the existence of all other atoms connected in the universe.
The late physicist Peter Higgs stands in front of a photo of the LHC at the Science Museum's "Collider" exhibition in November 2013. Photo: GI
Higgs was present in a packed auditorium at CERN to hear the announcement of the discovery, along with Belgian physicist Francois Englert, who had independently proposed a similar theory.
"We have reached a major milestone in our understanding of nature," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. Tears welled up in the physicist's eyes as he told his fellow researchers, "It's unbelievable that this has happened in my lifetime."
Both Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
The Higgs boson completed the Standard Model, but much more research is needed to fully understand it. The discovery of the Higgs boson has led scientists to focus on the vast majority of the universe that remains unexplained, as well as ideas like parallel universes.
Born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle, northeast England, Peters Higgs studied at King's College London and received his PhD in 1954. He spent most of his career at the University of Edinburgh, becoming Head of Theoretical Physics at the Scottish university in 1980. He retired in 1996.
"Peter Higgs was a quiet and modest man who never seemed comfortable with his fame, despite his work underpinning the entire modern theoretical framework of particle physics," says biochemist Joel Goldstein of the School of Physics at the University of Bristol.
Hoai Phuong (according to CNN, AP, DW)
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