The University of Edinburgh revealed on Tuesday that British physicist Peter Higgs, 94, had passed away. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his idea of a mass-giving particle, known as the Higgs boson.
He was a professor at the Scottish institution for almost fifty years. “He passed away peacefully at home on Monday 8 April following a short illness,” the university said in a statement.
It described him as “a great teacher and mentor, inspiring generations of young scientists”.
Who was Peter Higgs?
In 1964, Higgs, an assistant professor at the university, proposed the creation of a new particle to explain how other particles gain mass. He was 35 years old at the time. As the cornerstone of a collection of ideas known as the Standard Model, which contained everything of human understanding to date regarding elementary particles and the forces that shaped nature and the cosmos, the Higgs boson—also referred to as “the God particle”—would be discovered.
All About God Particle Discovery
His 1964 theory of a mass-imparting particle—famously called the “God particle” or Higgs boson—led to his joint 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics awardto Belgian physicist Francois Englert.
Over forty years of searching led to the discovery of the God’s particle. On July 4, 2012, it was found during experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) close to Geneva, Switzerland.
The Higgs boson is regarded as one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the modern period because it supports the Standard Model of Physics, which explains how different particles make up the universe.