Peter Higgs

Early life, education and career

At the age of 17, Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialized in mathematics, then to King's College London where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Physics, a masters degree, and Ph.D. He became a Senior Research Fellow at the Edinburgh University, then held various posts at University College London and Imperial College London before becoming a temporary lecturer in Mathematics at University College London. He returned to Edinburgh University in 1960 to take up the post of Lecturer in Mathematical physics, allowing him to settle in the city he had fallen in love with after hitch-hiking to the Edinburgh Fringe festival as a student.

Dr. Higgs was promoted to a personal chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and a fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Theoretical work in physics

It was at Edinburgh that he first became interested in mass, developing the idea that particles were massless when the universe began, acquiring mass a fraction of a second later, as a result of interacting with a theoretical field now known as the Higgs field. Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it their mass."Higgs particle", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
While the Higgs field is postulated to confer mass on quarks and leptons, it represents only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass.

The original basis of Higgs' work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu, from the University of Chicago. Professor Nambu had proposed a theory known as Spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in Superconductivity in condensed matter. However, the theory predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem), a clearly incorrect prediction.

Higgs wrote a short paper evading the Goldstone's theorem and it was published in Physics Letters, a European physics journal and edited at CERN in 1964.

Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism) but the paper was rejected (the editors felt that "it was of no obvious relevance to physics"). Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical Review Letters, a leading Physics journal where it was published later that year. Other physicists, Robert Brout and Francois Englert Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles had reached the same conclusion independently about the same time. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration.Physical Review Letters - 50th Anniversary Milestone Papers Nobelist Philip Anderson also claims to have "invented" the "Higgs" boson as far back as 1962.

Higgs is reported to be displeased that the particle is nicknamed the "God particle"--although Higgs is an atheist, he is afraid the term "might offend people who are religious"."Interview: the man behind the 'God particle'", New Scientist 13 Sept., 2008, pp. 44-5Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon Reuters news story. 7 April 2008. This nickname for the Higgs boson is usually attributed to Leon Lederman, but it is actually the result of Lederman's publisher's censoring. Originally Lederman intended to call it "the goddamn particle", because of its elusiveness.

It is expected that the Large Hadron Collider which opened at CERN in Switzerland in September 2008 will have the best chance of finding the Higgs boson because it is the biggest and highest energy particle accelerator built to date. If the Higgs boson is found at CERN (ironically, home to the editor who famously rejected his initial paper), Professor Higgs and others may be awarded the Nobel Prize “The Missing Piece” Page 17.

Family

Higgs has two sons: Chris, a computer scientist, and Jonny, a jazz musician.

References

"The Missing Piece" by Jessica Griggs from Edit the University of Edinburgh Alumni Magazine Summer 2008, Pages 16-17

External links

Google Scholar List of Papers by PW Higgs
A photograph of Peter Higgs, Photographs of Peter Higgs, June 2008
The god of small things - An interview with Peter Higgs in The Guardian
Peter Higgs: the man behind the boson - An article in the PhysicsWeb about Peter Higgs
Higgs v Hawking: a battle of the heavyweights that has shaken the world of theoretical physics - An article on the debate between Peter Higgs and Stephen Hawking about the existence of the Higgs boson
My Life as a Boson - A Lecture by Peter Higgs available in various formats
blog of an interview
Physical Review Letters - 50th Anniversary Milestone Papers
In CERN Courier, Steven Weinberg reflects on spontaneous symmetry breaking
Physics World, Introducing the little Higgs