Peter Higgs in front of a photo of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum’s ‘Collider’ exhibit on November 12, 2013 in London, England. (Image credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
On April 8, 2024, British theoretical physicist Peter Ware Higgs died at the age of 94. It was nearly 12 years back, on July 4, 2012, in a relatively inauspicious lecture hall situated in Geneva, Switzerland, when Higgs ended up being a renowned figure in modern-day science.
That was the day it was revealed that accidents in between particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) center– perhaps the most enthusiastic and adventurous science experiment ever– exposed the presence of the Higgs boson.
The discovery of the Higgs boson, called for Higgs himself, has actually been important for the field of particle physics. It was the last resident of the particle zoo that’s required to finish what’s called the “Standard Model of particle physics,” the very best description we have of deep space on the tiniest of scales.
For Higgs, born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K. to a Scottish mom and an English dad on May 29, 1929, the minute was met an outflow of feeling. This was unsurprising, considered that this statement represented the conclusion of 5 years of his work, and verified a theory that he declined to quit on.
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Beyond the conclusion of the Standard Model, the discovery of the Higgs boson indicated the requirement for physicists to start checking out physics beyond specifications they were utilized to, therefore setting the course for physics for years to come.
“Peter Higgs’ contribution to modern-day physics is definitely exceptional,” Luz Ángela García Peñaloza, a cosmologist at Universidad ECCI in Colombia informed Space.com. “His deal with quantum field theory resulted in a theory for which, later, he would be granted the Nobel Prize in Physics and describes the system that offers basic particles with mass.
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“He was method ahead of his time.”
50 years of looking for a single particle
The 20th century marked the birth of particle physics as a discipline of its own and stimulated big strides in the nascent field. As that century drew to a close and the particle zoo grew in terms of its residents, physicists began to question why some particles had mass and others, especially particles of light called “photons,” didn’t.
By 1964, physicists studying the weak nuclear force, which is among 4 essential forces of nature that identifies the atomic decay of components by changing protons to neutrons, concluded something unexpected.
The providers of this force, W and Z bosons, must be massless– yet, the reality that the weak force appeared strong over brief ranges and weak over fars away implied they could not be massless.