Background

Ethnicity: Peter Higgs was born to a Scottish mother and an English father.

Peter Ware Higgs was born on May 29, 1929, in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom to the family of Thomas Ware Higgs and his wife Gertrude Maude Coghill. His father worked as a sound engineer at the British Broadcasting Corporation. He spent part of his childhood in Birmingham. As a young boy, Higgs was raised by his mother in Bristol while his father relocated to Bedford. The family was not reunited until the end of the war.

Education

Peter Higgs missed a lot of early schooling. Bouts of serious asthma drifted into pneumonia, and he was kept home and taught by his parents. When illness wasn't disrupting Higgs's education, the war was. Bristol had already been thumped by German bombers, the old center almost completely flattened, but the outskirts where he lived and went to school took hits, too, from bombs shed by planes almost as an afterthought as they turned home from raids on the oil storage depots and ports at Avonmouth.

Higgs attended Halesowen Grammar School and Cotham Grammar School. His passion for mathematics and physics was kindled by an earlier alumnus of Cotham Grammar School, Paul Dirac, who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. At the age of 17, Peter Higgs moved to the City of London School where he studied mathematics.

Higgs graduated in 1950 with First Class Honours in Physics from King’s College London. A year later, he was awarded a Master of Science and began his research, initially under the supervision of Charles Coulson and subsequently under Christopher Longuet-Higgins. In 1954, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy for a thesis entitled 'Some Problems in the Theory of Molecular Vibrations', work which signaled the start of his life-long interest in the application of symmetry to physical systems.

Career

In 1954, Peter Higgs moved to the University of Edinburgh for his second year as a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Senior Student and remained for a further year as a Senior Research Fellow. He returned to London in 1956 to take up an ICI Research Fellowship, spending a year at University College and a little over a year at Imperial College, before taking up an appointment as Temporary Lecturer in Mathematics at University College. In October 1960 Peter Higgs returned to Edinburgh, taking up a lectureship in Mathematical Physics at the Tait Institute. He was promoted to Reader in 1970, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974, and was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. Higgs retired in 1996, becoming Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.

Achievements

• Peter Higgs' most notable achievement is proposing that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles during their interaction, now known as Higgs mechanism thus predicting the existence of the scalar particle that is crucial for our understanding the origin of the mass of subatomic particles. This particle is known as the Higgs boson in his honor. This proposition led to the standard model of elementary particle interactions which has been confirmed by decades of work at particle physics laboratories.
  
  Higgs' contribution to physics has been recognized by numerous academic honors most notably the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with François Englert.

Works

More photos

• publication

  • Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons 1964

Religion

Higgs is an atheist. As an atheist, he has also appealed for people to stop calling the particle he proposed the God Particle - a name that started as a joke in a book on the subject written by physicist Leon Lederman.

Politics

Higgs was at one time deeply involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), but left when the organization extended its protests to nuclear power. He felt CND had confused controlled and uncontrolled release of nuclear energy. He also joined Greenpeace but quit that organization, too, when he felt its ideologies had started to trump its science.

Views

Until recently, few even questioned where mass comes from. Newton coined the term in 1687 in his famous tome, Principia Mathematica, and for 200 years scientists were happy to think of mass as something that simply existed. Some objects had more mass than others - a brick versus a book, say - and that was that. But scientists now know the world is not so simple. While a brick weighs as much as the atoms inside it, according to the best theory physicists have - one that has passed decades of tests with flying colors - the basic building blocks inside atoms weigh nothing at all. As the matter is broken down to ever smaller constituents, from molecules to atoms to quarks, mass appears to evaporate before our eyes. Physicists have never fully understood why.

While working on the conundrum, Higgs came up with an elegant mechanism to solve the problem. It showed that at the very beginning of the universe, the smallest building blocks of nature were truly weightless, but became heavy a fraction of a second later, when the fireball of the big bang cooled. His theory was a breakthrough in itself, but something more profound dropped out of his calculations.

Higgs's theory showed that mass was produced by a new type of field that clings to particles wherever they are, dragging on them and making the heavy. Some particles find the field more sticky than others. Particles of light are oblivious to it. Others have to wade through it like an elephant in tar. So, in theory, particles can weigh nothing, but as soon as they are in the field, they get heavy.

Science now knows that Higgs's extraordinary field, or something very similar to it, played a key role in the formation of the universe. Without it, the cosmos would not have exploded into the rich, infinite galaxies we see today. The spinning disc of cosmic dust that collapsed 4.5 billion years ago to form our solar system would never have been. No planets would have formed, nor a sun to warm them. Life would not have stood a chance.

In late summer 1964, two years before he would give his Princeton lecture, Higgs rushed out a succinct letter, packed with mathematical formulae that backed his discovery and sent it to a leading physics journal run from Cern, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. The paper was published almost immediately but went largely unnoticed. Higgs planned a second paper, to emphasize his discovery, but for now that would have to wait.

Higgs took the chance to retreat to Edinburgh and write his second paper, this time elaborating on the true implications of his work. In autumn 1964, he sent it to the same journal for publishing, but astonishingly the Cern editors rejected it. Evidently, it was considered "of no obvious relevance to physics." He quickly sent it to America's leading physics journal, where it appeared later that year.

In the late 1960s, American physicist Steven Weinberg and Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam independently incorporated Higgs’s ideas into what later became known as the electroweak theory to describe the origin of particle masses. After the discovery of the W and Z particles in 1983, the only remaining part of electroweak theory that needed confirmation was the Higgs field and its boson. Particle physicists searched for the particle for decades, and in July 2012 scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced, with Higgs in attendance, that they had detected an interesting signal that was likely from a Higgs boson with a mass of 125–126 gigaelectron volts (billion electron volts; GeV). Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

Quotations: "When you look at a vacuum in a quantum theory of fields, it isn't exactly nothing."

"There is a sort of mythology that grows up about what happened, which is different from what really did happen."

"Higgs mechanism should be renamed the “ABEGHHK'tH mechanism."

"The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest, I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realize what you're doing is not going to be much good."

"It’s about understanding! Understanding the world!"

Membership

Peter Higgs is a member of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

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  Royal Society of Edinburgh , United Kingdom

Personality

Higgs rarely gives interviews. Paper letters are his preferred means of communication.

Interests

• walking, swimming, music

Connections

In 1963 Peter Higgs married Jody Williamson. The have two sons, Chris and Jonny Higgs.

Father:

Thomas Ware Higgs

Mother:

Gertrude Maude Coghill

Son:

Chris Higgs

Son:

Jonny Higgs

Wife:

Jody Williamson

colleague:

Stephen Hawking

When Peter Higgs first proposed that an invisible field strewn across space gave mass to the building blocks of the universe, the theory was ridiculed by some of the most respected minds of the time.

Stephen Hawking had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn’t be found. He lost $100.

References

• Massive: The Higgs Boson and the Greatest Hunt in Science
  2013
• The Columbia Encyclopedia
  2000
• Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics
  2015