Peter Higgs, Physicist Who Discovered Higgs Boson, Dies Aged 94

jd shares a report: Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died. Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday. After a series of experiments, which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with Francois Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery. A member of the Royal Society and a Companion of Honour, Higgs spent the bulk of his professional life at Edinburgh University, which set up the Higgs centre for theoretical physics in his honour in 2012.

Prof Peter Mathieson, the university's principal, said: "Peter Higgs was 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." Prof Fabiola Gianotti, the director general at Cern and former leader of the Atlas experiment, which helped discover the Higgs particle in 2012, said: "Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple and profound way. "An important piece of Cern's history and accomplishments is linked to him. I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely." Jon Butterworth, a member of the Atlas collaboration, said Higgs was "a hero to the particle physics community." Further reading: Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today (2013);
How the Higgs Boson Particle Ruined Peter Higgs's Life (2022).

R-I-P

[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

It is sad to see him go but he certainly left a (cloud chamber) trail that we can follow.

Re:R-I-P

[93 Escort Wagon]

And he did live to see his prediction confirmed! That must've been enormously gratifying.

RIP Mr. Peter.

[williamyf]

You had a fantastic achievement.

Mr. Slashdot editor, you, on the other hand, must remeber that Mr. Higgs PREDICTED the existence of the Higgs boson, but it was the girls and boys at CERN that DISCOVERED it....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Higgs Mechanism

[Roger W Moore]

We call it the Higgs boson and the Higgs mechanism for good reason. Yes, others contributed as is always the case for any physics result but one person or group always has to take it over the line to put it all together and make the breakthrough and that was Higgs. The rest is politics.

Re:Higgs Mechanism

[Voice of satan]

We call it the BEH boson. From Brout, Englert and Higgs who postulated its existence. Brout died before the discovery by the CERN so only Englert and Higgs got the Nobel for it. Even if they were not the only three physicists implied in its prediction, as written above.

Re:

[Roger W Moore]

We call it the BEH boson.

I do not know anyone in the field who calls it that.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Roger W Moore]

his paper had two other authors.

This is factually wrong: you can see his paper here [aps.org].

Re:

[Petersko]

Hah... I was coming to post this exact piece of pedantry. :)

Hats off to him, though, and the rest of the team. It's like Darwin's hawkmoth. Somebody else might have technically found it... but the prediction itself was kickass.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

One of the headlines I saw claimed he discovered dark matter.

Prof. Higgs

[Roger W Moore]

At least he lived to see his prediction discovered. The story in the linked article about him being told by a neighbour of the discovery though is utter nonsense since he was in the CERN auditorium in person when the discovery was first announced!

Re:

[fropenn]

Either way, it's extremely lucky that he got to work on identifying the presence of a boson that has his same name!

"Discover" vs. "Confirm"

[Tablizer]

Could we say that CERN "confirmed" it? It's more like early evidence pointed toward it, and Dr. Higgs discovered these pointers, but couldn't verify what he deduced them pointing to.

To use a bigfoot analogy, Dr. Higgs discovered bigfoot's footprints, and speculated on what the rest of the creature looked like using extrapolation and logic (similarity to other animals with similar feet, weight and size based on gait, etc.)

One day the CERN Posse followed a set of footprints and actually spotted the creature a

One More

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

My father - who's been gone for over 26 years now - went to school with him, I think it was called Colston. No stories though.

Re:

[Targon]

I wouldn't be sure that we see few great minds these days, but the number of stupid people has been increasing at an exponential rate, and it is more difficult to find those great minds.

Re: A great mind

[pitch2cv]

It is sad to see these giants die, but sadder to see that there's really almost nobody interested in standing on their shoulders.

I would beg to differ. 10.000s of them are working at particle, GW or neutrino detectors or at space observatories, and orders of magnitude more are working with the observations those deliver. Be it as theoretical physicists, computer programmers in engineering and what not.

But after many years of confirmations (and some rejections), the work has become immense.
First, anyone who

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Okay boomer.

Sorry, there's really nothing else to say to such utter crap.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Real physics went dark, man.

I was following a very promising gravity research Postdoc on LinkedIn who then announced a job he got at Lockheed and then his profile disappeared.

Academics play with math and pretend it's getting closer to reality.

This guy was full professor material but he chose to be a physicist instead.

Even arXive will blacklist you if you publish on antigravity, new energy, anti-Dark Matter, or anti-Big Bang.

Theorized not discovered

[avandesande]

Deserves all the credit for the theory, but the discovery was the work of hundreds.

Re: Theorized not discovered

[JoeRobe]

This. He is deservedly in the Pantheon of physicists because he (and other coauthors) predicted it. But as is the case in high energy physics, experimental discovery is the culmination of the effort of hundreds (or more) scientists and engineers.

Higgs

[madbrain]

My father, who co-discovered the charm quark, was chasing the Higgs boson for a very long time. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2010 at 67, 2 years short of the Higgs discovery.

Now truly...

[sajavete]

... immortal. Salute!

Not a sailor then?

[garryknight]

Oh, he was a physicist. I thought he was a sailor. I always thought of him as Higgs, Bo'sun.

How it was nicknamed "the God Particle"

[twosat]

The Higgs boson's nickname "the God Particle" was solidified upon its discovery, namely as a result of the popular media. The origin of this is often connected to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman referring to the Higgs boson as the "Goddamn Particle" in frustration with regards to how difficult it was to detect. https://www.space.com/higgs-bo... [space.com]