Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who died in 1964 at the age of 94, proposed that the universe contains an all-pervasive essence that can manifest in the form of particles. The idea inspired governments to spend billions of dollars to find what became known as Higgs bosons.
The so-called “Higgs mechanism” controls the rate of thermonuclear fusion that powers the sun, but this engine of the solar system will be outdated long before evolution can work its wonders on earth. The structure of the atom and matter, and possibly existence itself, is suspected to have arisen as a result of the mechanism proven true by the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman described the boson as the “God particle”. Higgs, an atheist, found this inappropriate and misleading, but the name stuck and brought fame to the idea and to Higgs. He also became a Nobel Prize winner in 2013.
As a young lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1960s, Higgs became interested in the profound and intriguing ways in which features (mathematical symmetries) in the equations that define fundamental laws could be hidden in emergent structures.
For example, a water droplet in space, unaffected by the earth’s gravity, looks the same in every direction: it is spherically symmetric, in keeping with the symmetry implied by the fundamental mathematical equations that describe the behavior of water molecules. However, when water freezes, the resulting snowflake takes on a different symmetry; Even though the basic equations remain the same, its shape only looks the same when rotated through multiples of 60 degrees.
Japanese-American physicist Yoichiro Nambu first sparked interest in this phenomenon, known as spontaneous symmetry breaking, in 1960.
Inspired by Nambu’s work, Higgs’ own theory emerged in 1964 with his explanation of how equations requiring massless particles (such as the quantum theory of the electromagnetic field giving rise to the massless photon) could be done by the so-called Higgs mechanism: giving rise to particles with mass.
This idea would later be at the origin of Gerardus ‘t Hooft’s 1971 explanation of the weak force responsible for radioactivity, in which a large “W” particle plays a role similar to the massless photon. The discovery of W later in 1983 won Nobel prizes for both the experiment and the theorists who predicted it. Underlying this success was a mechanism called the Higgs mechanism that controlled the mathematics in this explanation of the weak force.
When Nambu won the Nobel Prize in 2008, it seemed that the path to eventual recognition of the Higgs was being prepared.
But one problem, as Higgs always emphasized, was that he was not alone in exploring the possibility of mass arising “spontaneously”. Similar ideas have already been expressed: by condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson, albeit in a more limited way, and by Robert Brout and François Englert in Belgium, who outpaced the Higgs by a few weeks. Tom Kibble, a former colleague of Higgs’ at Imperial College, and two colleagues would write a paper along similar lines weeks later.
It was with the boson that the Higgs had legitimate claims to uniqueness. He pointed out that in certain cases spontaneously breaking symmetry means that a large particle must arise whose tendency to interact with other particles is proportional to their mass.
It will be the discovery of this particle that will provide experimental confirmation that the theory is indeed a description of nature. Although this boson was implicitly involved in other studies, it was Higgs who most sharply expressed its implications in particle physics.
The so-called “Higgs boson” became the standard bearer of the Large Hadron Collider. In the early 1990s, science minister William Waldegrave issued his challenge: Describe the Higgs boson on paper and help me persuade the government to fund it.
The most famous of the winners was the analogy made by David Miller of University College London of Margaret Thatcher (a giant particle) wandering around a Tory conference cocktail party, picking up snags as she moved. Higgs, whose policies are diametrically opposed to his, said he was “very pleased” with this statement.
As a celebrity, he was always uncomfortable. When Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, prepared to launch the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2008, the media promoted it as a search for the Higgs boson.
Higgs felt that Cern was misled by mentioning the “boson”; He was always the first to point out that others had much the same idea and that it was unfair to name it after him. He once modestly described the detection of the boson as “tying up loose ends” and saw the real excitement of the LHC as its potential to unlock the secrets of dark matter and other new types of physics.
However, in July 2012, Cern announced the discovery of a particle “with Higgs-like properties”. The media frenzy grew and Higgs bravely accepted his fate as a center of attention.
Although most physicists were confident that the eponymous boson had been discovered, several more months of work were needed before full confirmation: the 2012 Nobel prize went elsewhere. By 2013 the evidence was compelling; There was a general expectation that it would be 2013.
At this stage, it had been 49 years since Higgs wrote his first paper on the subject. In a final, nail-biting twist, the announcement of his long-awaited achievement was delayed by an hour as the Nobel committee tried to reach the famously reclusive scientist. Aware that he might attract media attention, Higgs had decided to be “elsewhere” when the announcement was made, telling colleagues he planned to holiday in the north-west Highlands of Scotland.
However, as the date approached, he realized that this was not a good plan for that time of year and decided to stay home and be somewhere else at the right time. He left home at around 11am on the morning of 8 October, and by lunchtime when the announcement was due to be made he was in Leith, at a beachside pub called Vintage, which Higgs confirmed sold both food and “pretty good beers”. ”.
So with Higgs remaining uncommunicative (he largely avoided using mobile phones or the internet), after more than an hour of unsuccessful attempts to reach him, the Swedish Academy decided to make the public announcement anyway. The ironic result was that by 14:00, the news that Peter Higgs and Englert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles had won the Nobel Prize in physics was known to the whole world, but not Higgs himself. (Englert’s colleague Brout died in 2011 and could not be included in the list because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.)
Higgs later recalled how he returned home after lunch “after a suitable interval” but still unaware of the news. However, he postponed it further by visiting an art exhibition “because it was probably too early to return home where reporters would gather.”
At three o’clock he was walking along Heriot Row, heading for his flat in the next street, when a car stopped near Queen Street Gardens. A lady came out “very excited” and told Higgs: “My daughter just phoned from London and told me about the prize.” Higgs replied: “What reward?” He was joking when he explained, but that’s when his expectations were confirmed.
His plan was successful, because “I managed to get through my front door without doing any more damage than a lurking photographer.” Just over a decade later, the LHC’s main focus has been on producing large numbers of Higgs bosons to understand the nature of the ubiquitous essence they form.
During the coronavirus quarantine, I spent hours on the phone with him on weekends while researching the biopic Elusive: How Peter Higgs Mass Mystery of Mass (2022). When asked to summarize his perspective on the public reaction to bozon, he said: “It ruined my life.” Getting to know nature through mathematics, seeing your theory confirmed, gaining the admiration of your colleagues and winning the Nobel Prize, how can this be tantamount to destruction? He explained: :My relatively peaceful existence was coming to an end. I don’t like this kind of promotion. My style is to work alone and have a bright idea every now and then.
Higgs worked as a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh for more than half a century. Perhaps that is why he was described in many media reports as a “Scottish physicist”, when in fact he was born in Newcastle to English parents Thomas Ware Higgs and Gertrude Maud (née Coghill).
His father was a sound engineer for the BBC and the family immediately moved to Birmingham, where Peter spent his first 11 years. With the Second World War raging in 1941, the BBC decided that Birmingham was too dangerous and its operations were transferred to Bristol. The Higgs family duly moved there in an attempt to avoid aerial bombardment, but the center of Bristol was heavily bombed the following weekend.
Higgs attended Cotham grammar school in Bristol, where one of his famous former students was the Nobel physicist Paul Dirac. Dirac’s name was prominent on the honorary board. Higgs followed, but initially in mathematics rather than physics. Higgs’ father had a collection of mathematics books that inspired Peter and kept him well ahead of the class. His interest in physics was sparked in 1946 when he heard Bristol physicists, later Nobel laureates Cecil Powell and Nevill Mott, explain the background to the atomic bomb programme. Although this helped define his career, Higgs later became a member of CND.
He studied theoretical physics at King’s College London and received his doctorate in 1954. He was working on molecular physics, applying ideas of symmetry to molecular structure. His interests turned to particle physics, although his own work had no direct connection to their program and was in the same corridor as the offices of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, the two people who discovered the structure of DNA.
He won research fellowships first at the University of Edinburgh (1954-56), then at University College in London (1956-57) and at Imperial College (1957-58). In 1958 he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at University College London and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1960, where he spent the remainder of his research career. He initially served as a lecturer in mathematical physics, was appointed reader in 1970, and became professor of theoretical physics in 1980. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974 and a Fellow of the FRS in 1983.
He met his future wife, linguist Jody Williamson, at a CND meeting in 1960. They married in 1963 and had two sons, Christopher and Jonathan. Although they divorced in 1972, they remained friends until his death in 2008.
Higgs has won many awards in addition to the 2013 Nobel Prize. In addition to numerous honorary degrees, these included the Dirac medal and prize from the Institute of Physics in 1997, the Wolf prize in physics in 2004, the Sakurai prize of the American Physical Society in 2010, and the Edinburgh medal in 2013. he was also appointed a Companion of Honour, and two years later was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley medal, the world’s oldest scientific award.
His sons survive him.
• Peter Ware Higgs, theoretical physicist, born May 29, 1929; Died April 8, 2024