EXPERT REACTION: Prof Peter Higgs, who proposed the 'God particle', has died aged 94

The Higgs boson is by far the most mysterious particle that makes up the building blocks of the universe.

Before the work of Higgs and several others in the 1960s, the best description of the universe suffered from the fatal flaw that it predicted all particles to be massless. The special features of the Higgs boson solved that problem in an elegant way that suddenly made the theory agree with the obvious fact that particles have mass.

It was only in 2012 that the Large Hadron Collider then managed to observe Higgs bosons and thus lead credence to what prior to that was just a hypothesis.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Higgs in 2013, just a year after the discovery. It is an ironic fact that the ever shy Peter Higgs got his predicted particle named after himself, an accomplishment that many other less shy physicists could only dream about.

Peter Higgs' pioneering work has mobilized thousands of experimental physicists in the pursuit of the Higgs particle—a fundamental piece of the puzzle explaining why fundamental particles possess mass and, consequently, why we do exist.

Personally, being part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson through the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has been an extraordinary experience, marking a significant milestone in scientific history.

Peter Higgs will be famously remembered for his work in the mid-60s that led to the award of the Nobel Prize, shared with Francois Englert.

The 2013 Nobel Prize was awarded after the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider discovered the existence of the Higgs boson. 

Prof Higgs' legacy lives on in the increasingly accurate measurements of the production and decay of the Higgs boson at the upgraded Large Hadron Collider and the next generation of particle physicists using this fundamental particle to make measurements with some of the world’s most sensitive detectors.

Peter Higgs, alongside Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble, spearheaded a groundbreaking advancement in our comprehension of how elementary particles acquire mass.

This breakthrough delves into the core of fundamental physics because the symmetries governing the fundamental laws initially preclude particle mass.

The Higgs Mechanism ingeniously circumvents this obstacle by dynamically generating mass while preserving the integrity of the fundamental symmetries.

Our current grasp of elementary particle masses builds upon Einstein's elucidation of mass within the framework of general relativity. A significant challenge looming over fundamental physics is to achieve a unified understanding encompassing these two distinct concepts of mass.

Peter Higgs made one of the most important contributions ever to our understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe.

The very subtle 'Higgs mechanism', which explains the origin of the masses of elementary particles, is a vital ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, our current best theory of the fundamental structure of matter. Without it, the theory would fall apart.

Higgs, the human being, was famously modest. He gave due credit to other physicists who also discovered the gist of what we call the Higgs mechanism. He explained sometimes abstruse physics with admirable lucidity, overcoming his natural shyness when being interviewed.

He had to wait almost 50 years to see his idea vindicated through the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012.

Apart from his seminal, Nobel Prize-winning work, he was notoriously unproductive as a researcher, being the author of just a handful of papers. This, perhaps, makes the point that having one brilliant idea in a career is worth more than 200 ordinary ideas.

In Professor Peter Higgs, physics has lost a gentle giant of the field. Higgs’ work is rightly celebrated as an incredible feat of curiosity-driven research: his proposal in 1964 about the potential existence of a field (the Higgs field) and related particle (known as the ‘Higgs boson’) seemed at the time to be an obscure idea… just one of many theoretical mechanisms put forward to explain unknowns in fundamental physics. It then took almost 50 years – and around 13,000 other scientists and engineers – to build the experiments (ATLAS and CMS) that enabled the Higgs boson to be discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. 

What is less well known is that this field of curiosity-driven research has had enormous practical influence in our lives: particle physics has produced unimaginable spin-offs, from the invention of the World Wide Web to better cancer treatment technologies. Higgs’ story represents an important lesson for us all about how science works: he would have been the first person to point out that science does not happen on the timescales of a few years. So, if there is one thing to take away from his story it is that we need to ensure long-term support for curiosity-driven research if we are to make the kinds of breakthroughs in our understanding of the Universe that Peter Higgs is celebrated for. 

Today, Higgs’ legacy lives on in the community of over 10,000 researchers in particle physics and related fields whose influence in the world is vastly more than scientific. As we celebrate Peter’s life and work, it is worth remembering the incredible human story of the search for the Higgs boson which (among other ideas) motivated more than 10,000 scientists from over 30 different countries to learn how to work together toward a common goal based on sheer curiosity. This feat is more relevant today than ever, as we find ourselves in a time of political tension, with many wicked problems facing humanity that will require more than ever our successful scientific collaboration.