UK Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs dies aged 94

Physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of an undetected particle in the universe changed science and was vindicated by a Nobel prize-winning discovery half a century later, has died aged 94, the University of Edinburgh said on Tuesday.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN research centre near Geneva was widely hailed as the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over 30 years, and pointed physics towards ideas that were once science fiction.

“For me personally it is just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be proved right in some way,” the British scientist told Reuters at the time.
“At the beginning, I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened.”
Edinburgh University, where Higgs held a professorial chair for many years, said he had passed away peacefully on Monday at home following a short illness.

“Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us,” said Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, the university Principal and Vice-Chancellor.
Higgs described himself as “incompetent” in the physics laboratory at school and at first preferred maths and chemistry. But inspired by quantum physicist Paul Dirac, who had attended the same school, he went on to specialise in theoretical physics.

What came to be known as the Higgs boson would solve the riddle of where several fundamental particles get their mass from: by interacting with the invisible “Higgs field” that pervades space.
That interaction, known as the “Brout-Englert-Higgs” mechanism, won Higgs and Belgium’s Francois Englert the Nobel prize in physics in 2013. Englert’s collaborator Robert Brout died in 2011.