One of the fathers of modern physics, the British scientist Peter Higgs, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting the existence of the so-called “God particle” in 1964, died after a short illness at the age of 94. all other particles have mass. This subatomic particle, which obeys Bose-Einstein statistics, is characterized by being scalar (i.e. its spin is zero), elementary (i.e. indivisible) and massive (it has its own mass) and is associated with the Higgs field, a structure that plays a fundamental role in the standard model, the theory of physics that describes the fundamental interactions (except gravitational all others: electromagnetic, weak and strong) and classifies the known elementary particles.
The Higgs boson was theorized in 1964 and first detected in 2012 in the Atlas and CMS experiments performed with the LHC particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva.. In 2013, Peter Higgs and François Englert were honored Nobel Price for physics for their discovery for the fact that we have, we read inmotivation«discovered a theory of a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the mass of subatomic particles and which was recently confirmed by the identification of the particle as predicted in a theoretical study, verified by the Atlas and Cms experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva».
Higgs’ death was announced by the University of Edinburgh, the university with which the British scientist was associated and where he taught for many years. Higgs, who graduated and majored at King’s College London, actually held the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, where he was made Emeritus Professor in 1996. He was a member of the English Royal Society.
“Peter Higgs was an extraordinary person, a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination enriched our knowledge of the world around us,” he said. Peter Mathieson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, who added: “His pioneering work has inspired thousands of scientists and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.” Higgs was known in the world of science long before his Nobel Prize for formulating a proposal in the mid-1960s to explain the origin of the mass of elementary particles within the electroweak theory. The mechanism he postulated received his name, the “Higgs mechanism”, and predicted the existence of a new subatomic particle, more precisely the “Higgs boson”.