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Prof Peter Higgs was best known for that mysterious-sounding thing nicknamed the ‘God particle’ – or just simply, and probably better-put, the Higgs boson.
He came up with the revolutionary idea in the 1960s when he wanted to explain why the basic building blocks of the Universe – atoms – have mass.
His theory about what binds the Universe together, which other scientists also worked on at the same time, sparked a 50-year search for the Holy Grail of physics.
The particle was finally discovered in 2012 by scientists using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland. It completed what is called the standard model of particle physics.
A famously shy man, he told journalists: “It’s very nice to be right sometimes.”
His work earned him the Nobel Prize for physics a year later.
Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929. At school in Bristol he was a brilliant student who won prizes for his science work – though it was in chemistry, not physics.
He completed a PhD at King’s College in London but was beaten to a job there by his friend. Instead he went to the University of Edinburgh where he continued to ask the question: why do some particles have mass?
His theory struggled to find a place in scientific journals – partly because few understood it – but it was finally published in 1964.
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