Peter Higgs
Physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 for the Higgs boson
Born 1929 · Died 2024
Photo: Bengt Nyman · CC BY 2.0
«Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.»
Peter Higgs predicted in 1964 that a field filling all of space gives other particles their mass, and that the field would show up as a new particle. It was found at CERN in 2012, forty-eight years later, and he received the Nobel Prize the following year.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 2013, for the Higgs mechanism
- Predicted the Higgs boson in 1964, confirmed at CERN in 2012
Universities
Edinburgh, Scotland
Lecturer and then professor of theoretical physics from 1960, where he wrote the 1964 papers predicting the Higgs mechanism.
London
Took his bachelor's, master's and 1954 PhD in molecular physics at King's College London.
Facts
- His second 1964 paper was rejected by a journal as of no obvious relevance to physics; he added a paragraph predicting a new particle and it was accepted elsewhere.
- He had no mobile phone and heard about his Nobel Prize from a neighbour in the street who had seen it on the news.
- He said he would never be hired by a modern university because he published so few papers.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.