Peter higgs & the higgs boson             home

Based on the name of the particle you can derive Peter Higg's importance to the particle. Peter Higgs was born on May 29, 1929 in Newcastle, United Kingdom. Due to his asthma he was educated at home until the age of 17. At that time he moved to London to study physics and math. Later, he earned his PhD from King's College in 1954. At that time he relocated to the University of Edinburgh where he has remained since.

In 1964 Peter Higgs along with Francois Englert and Robert Brout left their mark on the work when they proposed a theory describing the existence of a particle, later named the Higgs Boson, that was capable of explaining why certain particles have mass and where that mass originates from. Unfortunately the technology at the time was not able to test their theory so they had to wait. In 2012 some experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider found a particle that seemed to match the description of the Higgs Boson. After more experimental data was collected the Higgs Boson's existence was confirmed.

In 2013 the three particle physicists mentioned above received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider". The contribution of these three physicists to the the real of particle physics will never be forgotten.