Editor: Momoko So sleepy
The famous physicist Peter Higgs passed away at his home in Edinburgh, England on April 8 at the age of 94. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the Higgs boson.
Peter Higgs, the famous physicist who discovered the "God particle", passed away on Monday at the age of 94.
In 1964, in a new study, he predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson.
It also shows how the "God particle" maintains the overall structure of the universe by giving particles mass.
This prediction sparked nearly half a century of scientists searching for it, costing billions of dollars.
It wasn't until 2012 that CERN announced the discovery of the particle at the Large Hadron Collider, validating Peter Higgs' idea.
It was this contribution that earned him the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
According to physicist Alan Walker, a close friend and colleague at the University of Edinburgh, Peter Higgs died of a blood disorder.
The father of the "God Particle".
Peter Higgs was born on May 29, 1929 on the Tyne River in Newcastle, England, and grew up in Bristol.
His father was a BBC sound engineer and his mother was a housewife.
His love for physics began at Cotham Grammar School, the alma mater of Paul Dirac, the great British theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics.
17岁那年，Higgs转到了伦敦城市学校（City of London School）学习数学。
He then attended King's College London, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1947.
He continued his studies thereafter, culminating in a PhD in 1954 for his research on molecules and heat.
After temporary research positions at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London, Higgs found a permanent lecturer job at the University of Edinburgh in 1960.
Dr Higgs developed a deep affection for Edinburgh during his university years and enjoyed hitchhiking on adventures in the Scottish Highlands during his holidays.
During that time, he was also actively involved in the anti-nuclear movement and Greenpeace's activities.
However, when the actions of these organizations gradually became too radical and no longer aligned with his philosophy, he opted out.
However, it was during the anti-nuclear movement that he found his love for Jody Williamson, whom he married in 1963.
Unfortunately, they separated after 10 years, and his wife died in 2008, leaving behind two sons, computer scientist Christopher and musician Jonathan.
In Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs shifted his research focus from chemistry and molecules to his original passion: elementary particles.
Edinburgh was not only his place of work, but also the home of the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879).
Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism for the first time, proving that they are actually two different manifestations of the same force, the electromagnetic force that forms the basis of light.
Higgs' mission is to take physics to the next level.
- Revealing that Maxwell's electromagnetic force and the weak force controlling radioactivity are actually two different faces of the same force.
In 2012, Higgs received an honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University, pictured with a sculpture of Watt behind him
However, scientific progress is often tortuous, and Higgs did not realize at the time that he was in such a journey.
In an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, he recalled, "At that time, our goal was to solve the problem of strong interactions".
Strong interactions are the forces that hold the particles inside the nucleus of an atom from dispersing.
Theoretically, the particle that transmits this force, the boson, should be massless, like a photon that propagates light.
But light can travel through the entire universe, while strong interactions are only effective inside the nucleus, which according to the rules of quantum physics means that the mass of the particle that transmits the strong force should be close to that of a proton.
So, how did the powerful deliverer achieve such a huge mass?
In this regard, drawing on the ideas used by Philip W. Anderson of Princeton University in explaining superconductivity, Dr. Higgs proposed a hypothesis:
The space is filled with an invisible energy field, which is like a cosmic "energy slurry" filled with it.
This energy field acts on certain particles that try to pass through it, like a group of celebrities who follow closely behind, giving them mass.
This can be called a mystical force that pervades every corner.
He also noticed that under certain circumstances, a small part of this energy field could separate and form an entirely new particle.
First proposed
Higgs submitted his first paper on the subject, which was rejected.
However, instead of giving up, he rewrote the thesis.
To make the content more engaging, he added a special paragraph at the end of the paper, highlighting the prediction of a new particle, the Higgs boson.
Address: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508
The Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle", became the core of the so-called Standard Model.
This model summarizes all that humanity has known so far about elementary particles, and the forces that affect nature and the universe.
However, François Englert and Robert Brout of the Universiteit de Libre de Bruxelles had already published a paper with a similar idea, seven weeks before Higgs.
Soon after, three other physicists – Tom Kibble from Imperial College London, Carl Hagen from the University of Rochester, and Gerald Guralnik from Brown University – joined the discussion.
"They published it first, but I didn't know until Nambu told me."
Higgs once said in an interview, "There was no internet at that time, which meant that if he had seen their paper earlier, he probably wouldn't have written his own paper."
"At first, I wasn't sure if the study was really important," he admits.
In fact, the theory of strong interactions, which Higgs initially set out to study, later went in a completely different direction.
But his paper, and the particles he proposed, played a decisive role in understanding the so-called weak interactions.
Unbeknownst to Higgs, the American physicist Sheldon Glashow proposed a theory in 1961 that tried to unify weak and electromagnetic interactions.
But this theory also faces a dilemma: how to explain why the weakly interacting transmitters in the unified theory are not massless.
Coincidentally, the energy field proposed by Dr. Higgs provides the answer to this question.
Unfortunately, he and Dr. Glashow didn't get a chance to learn about each other's research, even though they were close to meeting each other.
Particle theory spanning half a century
The Higgs boson became an important topic in 1967.
Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin at the time used it as the core of the unified theory of weak electricity.
By 1971, the Dutch theoretical physicist Gerardus 't Hooft had proved that the entire theory was mathematically valid, and the theory became even more important.
Higgs later recalled that Benjamin Lee, a physicist at Fermillab who named it the Higgs boson at a conference around 1972.
Probably because Weinberg's doctoral dissertation was the first to cite Higgs's paper.
The name Higgs is used not only to refer to this particle, but also to refer to the energy field that is generated, and the mechanism by which this field gives mass to other particles.
- This embarrassed Dr. Higgs and upset the other scientists who contributed their theories.
"For a while, I even jokingly called it the 'A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H Mechanism,' naming all the scientists who contributed to the theory (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)."
People's interest in bosons rises and falls like a tidal wave.
In 1988, Higgs gave the first round of interviews, and that was because CERN had launched a new type of accelerator called LEP, the Large Hadron Electron Collider, whose main mission was to find the Higgs boson.
By 2000, although some scientists claimed they had observed signs of the Higgs boson, there was another discussion when the LEP was turned off.
After a series of sophisticated experiments since 2008, Higgs' theory was finally confirmed by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland in 2012.
The following year, the Nobel Lecture Organizing Committee presented him with an award.
The Nobel Prize Higgs is shared with Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert, whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Later, Higgs revealed to the BBC that if it weren't for the fact that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he might have lost his job because of a lack of results.
"We have lost a giant in particle physics, without whose theory the atom would not exist and radioactivity could be as powerful as electricity and magnetism".
Today, physics has lost the giant forever.