Higgs, Peter Ware (1929-2024), a British physicist, shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics with the Belgian physicist François Englert. Higgs developed a theory to answer a fundamental question of physics: Why do electrons, protons, and other subatomic particles have mass? Mass is the quantity of matter in an object. According to Higgs’s theory, space is filled with special particles that interact with electrons, protons, and other objects to give them mass.
Higgs developed the theory in 1964. At about the same time, the Belgian physicists Robert Brout and Englert, working independently of Higgs, described the same interaction. The interaction came to be known as the Higgs mechanism, and the special particles are called Higgs bosons. Both are essential parts of the Standard Model, the leading theory of subatomic particles and their interactions.
On July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN, a research center in Geneva, Switzerland, announced significant evidence for a particle thought to be the Higgs boson. The evidence was collected using a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider.
Higgs was born on May 29, 1929, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. degree in physics from King’s College, University of London. He was on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from 1960 until he retired in 1996. Higgs died on April 8, 2024.
