Peter Higgs was one of the greats of particle physics. He transformed what we know about the building blocks of the universe

By Harald Fox, Lancaster University

Peter Higgs, who gave his name to the subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson, has died aged 94. He was always a modest man, especially when considering that he was one of the greats of particle physics – the area of science concerned with the building blocks of matter.

In 1964, a few years after arriving from London to take up a position at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs read a paper by the American theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. At the time, physicists did not have a theory for how subatomic particles got their mass. (Mass can be described as the total amount of matter in an object, while weight is the force of gravity acting on an object.)

Anderson’s paper showed that particles can have mass. When a system in physics – such as two different subatomic particles – becomes changed, physicists sometimes describe it as having “broken symmetry”. This can lead to the emergence of new properties.

During a walk in the Scottish Highlands, Higgs had the idea of a lifetime. He figured out exactly how to apply the symmetry breaking he had read about in Anderson’s paper to an important group of particles called gauge bosons. It would lead to an explanation for how the building blocks of matter acquire their mass.

Two other groups of physicists had the same idea at around the same time: Robert Brout and François Englert in Brussels, and Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble at Imperial College London.

An afterthought

The key distinguishing feature of Higgs’s contribution was that, as an afterthought, he predicted the existence of a new massive particle left over from the process he had worked out in the Highlands. This particle would later bear his name: the Higgs boson.

I believe it was always a bit of an embarrassment to Higgs that this symmetry-breaking mechanism was sometimes shortened to the “Higgs mechanism”.

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