Personalities of science

Higgs, Peter Ware, 29. 5. 1929, Newcastle upon Tyne, England – 8. 4. 2024, Edinburgh, Scotland, British theoretical physicist. Due to the disease – asthma, he was educated at home as a child. He attended the gymnasium in the years 1941 – 1946. Here he was inspired by the work of an alumni of this school – Paul Dirac. He received his master's degree at King's College in London and his doctorate there in 1954 with work on the theory of molecular vibrations. His other places of work were the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, University College London and again the University of Edinburgh, where he was emeritus professor until the end of his life. In 1956 he started working in quantum field theory. In 1964, he wrote two papers describing the process, later known as the Higgs’ mechanism, in which particles are given mass by a scalar field. The journal to which he submitted his second paper rejected it. When Higgs revised his manuscript, he made a significant addition, according to which his theory predicted the existence of the heavy boson. (The mechanism described was independently discovered in 1964 by F. Englert and R. Brout and another group by G. Guralnik. C. Hagen and T. Kibble. However, neither group mentioned the boson.) At the end of the sixties of the 20th century. S. Weinberg and A. Salam independently incorporated Higgs' ideas into a concept later known as the theory of the electroweak interaction to describe the origin of particle mass. After the discovery of the W and Z particles (Nobel Prize 1979), the only part of the theory that needed confirmation was the Higgs’ field and his boson. In July 2012, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced detection of  a signal believed to be from  Higgs’ boson with a mass of 125–126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Definitive confirmation that the particle was a Higgs’ boson was announced in March 2013. A measure of the  Higgs’ excellence are the eponyms such as Higgs’ boson, Higgs’ mechanism, and Higgs’ field. Higgs did not approve of calling his boson the god particle. It was attributed to L. Lederman, but it was in fact an act of the publisher of his book, in the title of which this term appeared. P. Higgs was awarded numerous honors, such as the Hughes Medal, the Rutherford Medal, the Dirac Prize and Medal, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the J. J. Sakurai Prize, the Princess of Asturias Prize, he was a member of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he received honorary doctorates from sixteen, mostly British, universities. He became a Member of the Order of Companions of Honour. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 together with François Englert, Belgium, for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the origin of the mass of subatomic particles and which was confirmed by the discovery of the predicted elementary particle in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.