Peter Higgs, Nobel laureate who predicted the existence of the 'God particle', dies at 94

The Higgs boson was named after him. It has become a key element of the Standard Model, which contains all human knowledge of elementary particles.

Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle named after himself (and also after God), died Monday at his home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94 years old. It launched a half-century, billion-dollar, worldwide search for the particle that ended with champagne in 2012 and a Nobel Prize a year later.

The cause of death was a blood disorder, said Alan Walker, his close friend and fellow physicist at the University of Edinburgh, where Dr Higgs was emeritus professor.

Dr Higgs was a 35-year-old university assistant professor in 1964 when he proposed the existence of a new particle that could explain how other particles acquire mass. The Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” has become the cornerstone of a set of theories known as the Standard Model, which contains all human knowledge of elementary particles and the forces by which they shape nature and the universe.

Dr. Higgs was a modest man who eschewed the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. He didn't have a TV, didn't use email or a cell phone. For years, he relied on Professor Walker, who, according to one former student, was his “guide dog in the digital world.”

Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he received a standing ovation when he walked into a lecture hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and heard that his particle had finally been found. During a webcast from the laboratory, the whole world watched as he took out a handkerchief and wiped away a tear.

“It’s just incredible that this happened in my lifetime,” he said during the webcast.

Rather than linger at the parties, Dr Higgs flew straight home, celebrating with a can of London Pride beer on the plane. At CERN, where the control room has shelves of empty champagne bottles to commemorate the great events, they later asked if the can could be taken back, but Dr Higgs had already thrown it away.

Peter Ware Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the son of BBC sound engineer Thomas Ware Higgs and housewife Gertrude Maud (Coghill) Higgs. He grew up in Bristol.

His interest in physics was awakened when he attended the same school, Gotham Grammar School, as Paul Dirac, the great British theorist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics (it had no mother). This theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying particles of energy called bosons, would be the area in which Dr Higgs would become 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 received his PhD in 1954 for his research on molecules and heat.

After temporary research posts at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London, he took up full-time teaching at Edinburgh in 1960. Dr Higgs fell in love with the city during his college days, when he often walked through the Scottish Highlands.

During those years, he also took an active part in the political activities of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace. But he left both organizations when they became too radical for his taste.

It was in the disarmament movement that he met and fell in love with fellow activist Jodie Williamson. They married in 1963. She died in 2008. Dr Higgs is survived by two sons, Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonathan, a musician, and two grandchildren.

In Edinburgh, Dr Higgs redirected his research from chemistry and molecules to his first love – elementary particles.

Edinburgh was the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who achieved the first great unification of physics by showing that electricity and magnetism are different manifestations of the same force, electromagnetism, which creates light. Dr. Higgs would be destined to take physics the next step, to a theory that could be written on a T-shirt, helping to show that Maxwell's electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different manifestations of the same thing.

However, as often happens in the zigzag progress of science, this is not what Dr. Higgs thought he was doing.

“At the time,” he recalled in an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, “the idea was to solve the problem of strong interaction.”

The strong force holds atomic nuclei together. According to the theory, the particles that carry this force—bosons—should be massless, like the photon that carries light. But while light traverses the entire universe, the strong force's range is barely the size of an atomic nucleus, which, according to quantum rules, means that the particle carrying it must be almost as massive as an entire proton.

So how did the strong force carriers become so massive?

Adapting an idea that Philip W. Anderson of Princeton had used to explain superconductivity, Dr. Higgs proposed that space was filled with an invisible field of energy. This field affects particles trying to move through it, like an entourage attaching itself to a celebrity trying to get into a bar, giving them what we perceive as mass. Let's call it “spooky action all over the place” [отсылка к «пугающему дальнодействию», как Эйнштейн называл квантовую запутанность / прим. перев.].

In some situations, he noted, part of this field can peel off and appear as a new particle.

However, his first paper on the topic was rejected, and he rewrote it, “spice up,” as he put it, with a new paragraph at the end emphasizing the prediction of a new particle, which came to be called the Higgs boson.

It turned out that François Englert and Robert Braut of the Free University of Brussels were seven weeks ahead of him with a similar idea. They were soon joined by three more physicists—Tom Kibble of Imperial College London, Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester, and Gerald Guralnick of Brown University.

“They were the first, but I didn't know until Nambu told me,” Dr. Higgs said in an interview, referring to Yoichiro Nambu, a physicist at the University of Chicago and Nobel laureate who edited the journal. There was no Internet back then, he said, his voice breaking, implying that if he had seen their article, he probably would never have written his own.

“I wasn’t sure at first that this idea would be important,” Dr. Higgs continued. As the others.

In fact, the theories describing the strong force that Dr. Higgs set out to study subsequently took a different path. But his paper and his particle will be decisive for the so-called weak interaction.

Without knowing Dr. Higgs, the American physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1961 proposed a theory combining the weak and electromagnetic forces, but it had the same problem – how to explain why the carriers of the weak part of the “electroweak force” are not massless.

Dr. Higgs's magic field would have been just the thing, but he and Dr. Glashow did not know each other's work, although they almost met once.

One of Dr Higgs' duties as a junior professor at Edinburgh in 1960 was to provide daily refreshments for the Scottish Summer Conference that was being held there. Dr. Glashow, who was attending the conference, and his friends hid bottles of wine provided by Dr. Higgs in grandfather clocks, then returned and stayed up all night, draining them and discussing electroweak unification.

Dr. Higgs, meanwhile, lay in bed. “I didn’t know they were stealing my wine,” he said in an interview.

The boson became a celebrity in 1967 when Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin made it a major player in unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. It gained even greater significance in 1971, when the Dutch theorist Gerardus 't Hooft proved that the whole scheme made mathematical sense.

According to Dr. Higgs, Benjamin Lee, a Fermilab physicist who later died in a car accident, dubbed it the Higgs boson at a conference around 1972, possibly because Dr. Higgs' paper was cited first in Dr. Weinberg's paper.

The name stuck not only to the particle, but also to the field that produced it, and to the mechanism by which that field imparted mass to other particles—much to the embarrassment of Dr. Higgs and the irritation of other theorists.

“For a while,” Dr. Higgs recalls, laughing, “I called it the A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H mechanism,” listing the names of all the theorists who contributed to the theory (Anderson, Broth, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble and 't Hooft).

Interest in the boson came and went in waves. The first round of interviews with Dr. Higgs took place in 1988, when a new accelerator called the LEP (Large Electron Positron collider) was launched at CERN. One of his main goals was the search for the Higgs boson. The next revolution came in 2000, when the LEP was closed, despite statements by some scientists that they had seen traces of the Higgs boson.

Dr. Higgs was skeptical. “They pushed the car beyond its limits,” he recalls.

By that time, he had abandoned his research, having come to the conclusion that high-energy particle physics had simply moved far ahead, leaving him behind.

He was trying to work on a trendy new theory called supersymmetry that would push the unification of forces even further, but “I kept making stupid mistakes,” he says. He later told the BBC that his lack of productivity might have led to his dismissal long ago if it had not been known that he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize.

In recent years, Dr Higgs lived in a fifth-floor flat in the historic New Town district of central Edinburgh, around the corner from the birthplace of Maxwell, the great Scottish theorist who grew up in the area.

Even before the Nobel Prize wrote it into history, it became one of the city's tourist attractions, a kind of pedestrian monument to science, and winner of the 2011 Edinburgh Prize for “outstanding contribution to the development of science.”

The following year he joined his idols Dirac and Maxwell in receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Professor Englert. But he never liked being in the center of events. On the day the physics prize was to be announced, he decided it was time to leave town.

Unfortunately, his car broke down. Stuck in the city, he decided to go have lunch. But on the way, a neighbor intercepted him and told him that he had received a bonus.

“What prize?” Higgs joked.