Peter Higgs

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Peter Higgs
HonFInstP
Higgs in 2013
Born
Peter Ware Higgs

(1929-05-29)29 May 1929
Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Died8 April 2024(2024-04-08) (aged 94)
Edinburgh, Scotland
Alma materKing's College London (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Known for
Spouse
Jody Williamson
​
​
(m. 1963; div. 1972)​
Children2
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
Institutions
ThesisSome problems in the theory of molecular vibrations (1954)
Doctoral advisorsCharles Coulson[1][2]
Christopher Longuet-Higgins[1][3]
Doctoral students
Websitewww.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs Edit this at Wikidata
Signature

Peter Ware Higgs

Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.[9][10]

In 1964, Higgs was the single author of one of the three

discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[13] The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.[14]

For this work, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics which he shared with François Englert in 2013.[15]

Early life and education

Higgs was born

alumni, Paul Dirac, a founder of the field of quantum mechanics.[19]

In 1946, at the age of 17, Higgs moved to

Christopher Longuet-Higgins.[1] He was awarded a PhD degree in 1954 with a thesis entitled Some problems in the theory of molecular vibrations from the university.[1][18][25]

Career and research

After finishing his doctorate, Higgs was appointed a Senior

emeritus professor.[7]

Higgs was elected

Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it.[19][29]

The

Goldstone's theorem).[7]

Higgs reportedly developed the fundamentals of his theory after returning to his Edinburgh New Town apartment from a failed weekend camping trip to the Highlands.[31][32][33] He stated that there was no "eureka moment" in the development of the theory.[34] He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's theorem (massless Goldstone particles need not occur when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory[35]) and published it in Physics Letters, a European physics journal edited at CERN, in Switzerland, in 1964.[36]

Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (the Higgs mechanism), but the paper was rejected (the editors of Physics Letters judged it "of no obvious relevance to physics").[19] Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical Review Letters, another leading physics journal, which published it later in 1964. This paper predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (later named the Higgs boson).[35][37] Other physicists,

Tom Kibble[39]
had reached similar conclusions at about the same time. In the published version Higgs quotes Brout and Englert and the third paper quotes the previous ones. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert were each recognised as milestone papers by
Philip Anderson although he did not include a crucial relativistic model.[35][41]

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the

GeV).[42]
Speaking at the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."[13] Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs boson was made at the same place where the editor of Physics Letters rejected Higgs's paper.[7]

Awards and honours

Higgs was honoured with several awards in recognition of his work, including the 1981

Rutherford Medal from the Institute of Physics; the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics from the Institute of Physics; the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society; the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics; the 2009 Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the 2010 American Physical Society J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics; a unique Higgs Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012;[18] and the Royal Society awarded him the 2015 Copley Medal, the world's oldest scientific prize.[43]

Civic awards

Edinburgh Award handprints

Higgs was the recipient of the Edinburgh Award for 2011. He was the fifth person to receive the Award, which was established in 2007 by the City of Edinburgh Council to honour an outstanding individual who has made a positive impact on the city and gained national and international recognition for Edinburgh.[44]

Higgs was presented with an engraved loving cup by the Rt Hon George Grubb, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, in a ceremony held at the City Chambers on Friday 24 February 2012. The event also marked the unveiling of his handprints in the City Chambers quadrangle, where they had been engraved in Caithness stone alongside those of previous Edinburgh Award recipients.[45][46][47]

Higgs was awarded the Freedom of the City of Bristol in July 2013.[48] The Dirac-Higgs Science Centre in Bristol is also named in his honour.[49] In April 2014, he was also awarded the Freedom of the City of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was also honoured with a brass plaque installed on the Newcastle Quayside as part of the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative Local Heroes Walk of Fame.[50]

Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics

On 6 July 2012,

School of Physics and Astronomy and the iGEM 2015 team (ClassAfiED). The university has also established a chair of theoretical physics in the name of Peter Higgs.[52][53]

Nobel Prize in Physics

On 8 October 2013, it was announced that Higgs and François Englert would share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".[54] Higgs admitted he had gone out to avoid the media attention[55] so he was informed he had been awarded the prize by an ex-neighbour on his way home, since he did not have a mobile phone.[56][57]

Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour

Higgs turned down a

Holyrood House on 1 July 2014.[61]

Honorary degrees

Higgs was awarded honorary degrees from the following institutions:

A portrait of Higgs was painted by

School of Mathematics.[63] A large portrait by Lucinda Mackay is in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Another portrait of Higgs by the same artist hangs in the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell in Edinburgh, Higgs was the Honorary Patron of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. A portrait by Victoria Crowe was commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and unveiled in 2013.[66]

Personal life and political views

Higgs married Jody Williamson, an American lecturer in linguistics at Edinburgh and a fellow activist with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND),[67] in 1963. Their first son was born in August 1965.[68] Higgs had two sons: Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonny, a jazz musician.[69] He also had two grandchildren.[46] Higgs and Williamson divorced in 1972, but remained friends until she died in 2008.[70]

Higgs was an activist in the CND while in London and later in Edinburgh, but resigned his membership when the group extended its remit from campaigning against nuclear weapons to campaigning against nuclear power too.[19][71] He was a Greenpeace member until the group opposed genetically modified organisms.[71] Higgs was awarded the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics (sharing it with Robert Brout and François Englert) but declined to attend the awards ceremony in Jerusalem in protest of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.[72] Higgs was actively involved in the Edinburgh University branch of the Association of University Teachers, through which he agitated for greater staff involvement in the management of the physics department.[60]

Higgs was an

fundamentalist" view of non-atheists.[74] Higgs expressed displeasure with the nickname the "God particle".[75] Although it has been reported that he believed the term "might offend people who are religious",[69] Higgs stated that this is not the case, lamenting the letters he has received which claim the God particle was predicted in the Torah, the Qur'an and Buddhist scriptures. In a 2013 interview with Decca Aitkenhead, Higgs was quoted as saying:[76]

I'm not a believer. Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at

Cern proves the existence of God. The church in Spain has also been guilty of using that name as evidence for what they want to prove. [It] reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way. If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?

— The Guardian
, 6 December 2013

The nickname for the Higgs boson is usually attributed to

The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? but the name is the result of the suggestion of Lederman's publisher; Lederman had originally intended to refer to it as the "goddamn particle".[77]

Higgs died after a short illness at home in Edinburgh on 8 April 2024, at the age of 94.[78][79]

Bibliography

  • Higgs, P W (1979). "Dynamical symmetries in a spherical geometry. I".
    ISSN 0305-4470
    .
  • Higgs, Peter W. (27 May 1966). "Spontaneous Symmetry Breakdown without Massless Bosons".
    ISSN 0031-899X
    .
  • Higgs, Peter W. (19 October 1964). "Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons".
    ISSN 0031-9007
    .
  • Higgs, P. W. (1959). "Quadratic lagrangians and general relativity".
    ISSN 0029-6341
    .
  • Higgs, Peter W. (15 November 1958). "Integration of Secondary Constraints in Quantized General Relativity".
    ISSN 0031-9007
    .
  • Higgs, P. W. (1 March 1953). "Vibrational modifications of the electron distribution in molecular crystals. I. The density in a vibrating carbon atom".
    ISSN 0365-110X
    .

References

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Further reading

External links
Awards
Preceded by Nobel Prize in Physics laureate
2013
With: François Englert 		Succeeded by
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