Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle named after him (as well as God) and sparked a half-century, worldwide, billion-dollar search for it that culminated in champagne in 2012 and a Nobel Prize in a years later, died Monday at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is 94.
The cause was a blood disease, said Alan Walker, his close friend and fellow physicist at the University of Edinburgh, where Dr. Higgs is an emeritus professor.
Dr. Higgs was a 35-year-old assistant professor at the university in 1964 when he proposed the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles gain mass. The Higgs boson, also known as “the God particle,” would become the cornerstone of a set of theories known as the Standard Model, which encompasses all of human knowledge so far about elementary particles and the forces where they shape nature and the universe.
Dr. Higgs was a modest man who shunned the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. He does not own a television or use email or a cellphone. For years he relied on Professor Walker to act as his “digital seeing-eye dog,” in the words of a former student.
Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he received a standing ovation as he walked into a lecture hall in European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva and he heard that he had finally found his particle. In a webcast from the laboratory, the whole world watched him take out a handkerchief and wipe away a tear.
“It’s really an incredible thing that this happened in my life,” he said in the webcast.
Refusing to stick around for after-parties, Dr. Higgs flew right back home, celebrating on the plane with a can of London Pride beer. CERN, with shelves of empty Champagne bottles commemorating good times lining its control room, asked if it could have a can, but Dr. Higgs.
Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, on May 29, 1929, the son of a BBC sound engineer, Thomas Ware Higgs, and Gertrude Maude (Coghill) Higgs, who ran the household. He grew up in Bristol.
His interest in physics was renewed when he attended the same school, Cotham Grammar School, as before. Paul Dirac, the great British theorist who is one of the fathers (no mothers) of quantum mechanics. That theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying particles of energy called bosons, is the same field in which Dr. Higgs became famous.
At the age of 17, Peter moved to City of London School, where he studied mathematics. A year later, he entered King’s College London, graduating in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in 1954 for research on molecules and heat.
After temporary research posts at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London, he took a permanent job as a lecturer in Edinburgh in 1960. Dr. Higgs the city during his college days when he escaped on hitchhiking trips to the Scottish Highlands.
During those years, he was also politically active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace. But he dropped both when they became too radical for his taste.
In the disarmament movement he met and fell in love with fellow activist, Jody Williamson. They married in 1963. He died in 2008. Dr. Higgs their two sons, Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonathan, a musician, and two grandchildren.
In Edinburgh, Dr. transferred. Higgs his research from chemistry and molecules to his first love, elementary particles.
Edinburgh is the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who achieved the first great unification of physics, showing that electricity and magnetism are different manifestations of the same force, electromagnetism, that generates light. This will be the fate of Dr. Higgs pushed physics to the next step, toward a theory that could be written on a T-shirt, by helping to show that Maxwell’s electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different faces of the same thing. thing.
As is often the case with the spiraling progress of science, however, that’s not what Dr. Higgs that he does.
“At that time,” he recalled in an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, “the thinking was to resolve the strong force.”
The strong force holds atomic nuclei together. According to the theory, the particles that carry that force – bosons – should be massless, like the photon that transmits light. But as light travels through the universe, the strong force barely reaches an atomic nucleus, which, by quantum rules, means that the particle carrying it must be about the size of an entire proton. .
So how did the powerful force carriers get so big?
Adapting an idea used by Princeton’s Philip W. Anderson to help explain superconductivity, Dr. Higgs that space is filled with an invisible field of energy, a cosmic molasses. The field will act on several particles trying to pass through it like an entourage attaching itself to a celebrity trying to get to the bar, giving them what we see as mass. Call it scary action everywhere.
In some situations, he noted, a small portion of this field can peel off and emerge as a new grain.
His first role on the subject was rejected, however, so he rewrote it, “making it better,” as he put it, with a new paragraph at the end emphasizing the prediction of a new particle, to be called the Higgs boson.
This is it François Englert and Robert Brout, of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, beat him to print in seven weeks with a similar idea. Shortly thereafter three more physicists – Tom Kibble, of Imperial College London; Carl Hagen, of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik, of Brown University — chimed in.
“They came first, but I didn’t know until Nambu told me,” said Dr. Higgs in an interview, referring to Yoichiro Nambu, a physicist at the University of Chicago and also a Nobel laureate, who edited the journal. There was no internet back then, he said, his voice trailing off, implying that if he had seen their paper he probably wouldn’t have written his own.
“At first I wasn’t sure it was important,” Dr. continued. Higgs. Neither did the others.
In fact, the theories of the strong force, set forth by Dr. Higgs study, went the other way. But his role and his grain will be decisive for the so-called weak force.
Dr. didn’t know. Higgs, the American physicist Sheldon Glassow proposed a theory in 1961 that unified the weak force and the electromagnetic force, but it had the same problem of how to explain why the carriers of the weak part of the “electroweak force” are not massless.
The magic field of Dr. would have been just the ticket. Higgs, but neither they nor Dr. Glashow each other’s work, although they missed each other.
One of the duties of Dr. Higgs as the inaugural professor in Edinburgh in 1960 was to provide daily refreshments for a Scottish summer conference held there. Dr. Glashow, who was attending, and his friends were hiding bottles of wine given by Dr. Higgs in a grandfather clock and then come back and stay up all night talking about electroweak unity.
Meanwhile, Dr. Higgs is in bed. “I didn’t know they were stealing my wine,” he said in the interview.
The boson became a big deal in 1967 when Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, made it the linchpin in unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. This became a bigger deal in 1971, when the Dutch theorist Gerardus ‘t Hooft proved that the whole procedure made mathematical sense.
said Dr. Higgs Benjamin Leea Fermilab physicist who later died in a car crash, christened it the Higgs boson at a conference around 1972, perhaps because Dr. Higgs was first mentioned in the paper by Dr. Weinberg.
The name stuck, not only to the particle, but to the molasses field that produced it and the mechanism by which that field gave mass to other particles – somewhat to Dr.’s embarrassment. Higgs and to the annoyance of other theorists.
“For a while,” recalls Dr. Higgs, laughing, “I call it the “ABEGHHKH mechanism,” omitting the names of all the theorists who contributed to the theory (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs , Kibble and ‘t Hooft).
Interest in the boson has come and gone in waves. The first round of interviews with Dr. Higgs arrived in 1988, when CERN started a new accelerator named LEP, for the Large Electron Positron collider. One of its main goals is to find the Higgs boson. There was another twist when LEP was shut down in 2000 despite claims by some scientists that they had found traces of the Higgs boson.
Dr. Higgs was skeptical. “They pushed the engine beyond its limits.” he remembered.
By that time he had given up doing research, concluding that high-energy particle physics was simply beyond him.
He was trying to work on a fashionable new theory called supersymmetry, which would further advance the unification of forces, but “I kept making stupid mistakes,” he said. In fact, he later told the BBC that his lack of productivity would probably have got him fired long ago if it hadn’t been known that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, Dr. Higgs lived in a fifth-floor apartment in the historic New Town neighborhood of central Edinburgh, near the birthplace of Maxwell, the great Scottish theorist, who grew up in the neighborhood.
Even then the Nobel sealing his place in history, he became one of the city’s tourist attractions, a sort of walking monument to science, receiving the 2011 Edinburgh Award for his “outstanding contribution to the city.”
Dr. Higgs continued to teach until he retired in 1996, but his lack of research kept him from the strife and furor that resulted from the discovery of his boson. In 1999, he declined an offer of knighthood, but in 2012 he was named a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.
The following year he joined his idols Dirac and Maxwell in immortality by means of Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Professor Englert. But being in a fight is not his thing. On the day the physics prize was to be announced, he decided it would be a good time to leave town.
Unfortunately, his car doesn’t work. Stuck in town, he decided to go to lunch. But on the way a neighbor stopped him and said he had won a prize.
“What prize?” he joked.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
