Peter Higgs: The Loss of A Gentle Giant

My new piece in Quillette describes the scientific contributions of Peter Higgs, whose theoretical discovery helped lay the basis for the Standard Model of Particle Physics

(Peter Higgs visiting the CMS detector at CERN, November 15, 2018. Photo by Marc Buehler via Flickr.)

Peter Higgs, who shared the Nobel Prize in 2013 for the unveiling the mechanism that allowed a unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions, died last week. He was a kind and gentle man who avoided the limelight as much as he could. I penned a tribute that appeared in Quillette yesterday.

Peter Higgs was a gentle man who wanted a quiet life. However, fate had other plans for him. In 1964, after returning to his home in Edinburgh after a failed weekend camping trip, he hit upon an idea that was to become one of the most important building blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics: the Higgs mechanism. In 2012, the Higgs particle that his theory predicted was finally discovered at the European Laboratory for Nuclear Physics (CERN), thus providing the experimental underpinning of the physical models that describe three of the four fundamental forces of nature.

Higgs wrote up his idea in a two-page scientific paper entitled “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.” It was initially rejected by the major European physics journals, as having no obvious relevance to physics. But then he added a paragraph mentioning a possible observable consequence of his idea and submitted his paper to the American physics journal, Physical Review Letters, where it was published on 19 October 1964. Similar ideas were explored by the physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, and independently by Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, and these two groups also published their work in the same journal. But, perhaps as a result of that extra paragraph that predicted a physical consequence of his theory, it was Higgs’s name that became associated with the hypothesis, which ended up providing the cornerstone of the successful effort to unify two of the four known forces in nature: the weak and electromagnetic interactions. 

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To read the rest of this piece click on this link.