Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE is a British theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.
He is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining
the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular.
This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs
at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson. CERN announced
on 4 July 2012 that they had experimentally established the existence of a Higgs-like
boson, but further work is needed to analyse its properties and see if it has the properties
expected from the Standard Model Higgs boson. On 14 March 2013, the newly discovered particle
was tentatively confirmed to be + parity and zero spin, two fundamental criteria of a Higgs
boson, making it the first known fundamental scalar particle to be discovered in nature.
The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard
Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.
Higgs has been honoured with a number of awards in recognition of his work, including the
1981 Hughes Medal from the Royal Society, the 1984 Rutherford Medal from the Institute
of Physics, the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical
physics from the Institute of Physics, the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize
by the European Physical Society, the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics, the 2009 Oskar Klein
Memorial Lecture medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the 2010 American Physical
Society J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics and a unique Higgs Medal
from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012. The recent potential discovery of the Higgs
boson prompted fellow physicist Stephen Hawking to note that he thought that Higgs should
receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, which he finally did, shared with François
Englert in 2013. Higgs was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2013
New Year Honours.
Early life and education Higgs was born in the Elswick district of
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to an English father and Scottish mother. His father worked
as a sound engineer for the BBC, and as a result of childhood asthma, together with
the family moving around because of his father's job and later World War II, Higgs missed some
early schooling and was taught at home. When his father relocated to Bedford, Higgs stayed
behind with his mother in Bristol, and was largely raised there. He attended Cotham Grammar
School in Bristol from 1941–46, where he was inspired by the work of one of the school's
alumni, Paul Dirac, a founder of the field of quantum mechanics.
In 1946, at the age of 17, Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialized
in mathematics, then in 1947 to King's College London where he graduated with a first class
honours degree in Physics in 1950 and achieved a master's degree in 1952. He was awarded
an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and
studied for his doctorate in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and
Christopher Longuet-Higgins. He was awarded his PhD in 1954 for a thesis entitled 'Some
problems in the theory of molecular vibrations'. He became a Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Edinburgh during his time there, then held various posts at Imperial College
London and University College London where he also became a temporary lecturer in Mathematics.
He returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1960 to take up the post of Lecturer at
the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics, allowing him to settle in the city he had
enjoyed while hitchhiking to the Western Highlands as a student in 1949. He was promoted to Reader
in 1970 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1983.
Higgs was promoted to a personal chair of Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh in 1980.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983, was awarded the Rutherford Medal and
Prize in 1984, and became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. He retired in
1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Higgs received
an honorary degree from the University of Bristol in 1997. In 2008 he received an Honorary
Fellowship from Swansea University for his work in particle physics.
Research career Work in theoretical physics
At Edinburgh Higgs first became interested in mass, developing the idea that particles
– massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result
of interacting with a theoretical field. Higgs postulated that this field permeates space,
giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it.
The Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field which confers mass on quarks
and leptons. However this causes 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 laureate 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, a clearly incorrect prediction. Higgs is reported to have developed the basic
fundamentals of his theory after returning to his Edinburgh New Town apartment from a
failed weekend camping trip to the Highlands,. He stated that there was no "eureka moment"
in the development of the theory. He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's
theorem and published it in Physics Letters, a European physics journal edited at CERN,
in Switzerland, in 1964. Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical
model, but the paper was rejected. Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical
Review Letters, another leading physics journal, which published it later in 1964. This paper
predicted a new massive spin-zero boson. Other physicists, Robert Brout and Francois Englert
and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble had reached similar conclusions about the
same time. In the published version Higgs quotes Brout and Englert and the third paper
quotes the previous ones. 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. While each of these famous papers took similar
approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers
are noteworthy. The mechanism had been proposed in 1962 by Philip Anderson although he did
not include a crucial relativistic model. On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the ATLAS and
CMS experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which
could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts. Speaking at
the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened
in my lifetime." Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs Boson was made at
the same place where the editor of Physics Letters rejected Higgs' paper.
Other recognition Civic Awards
Higgs was the recipient of the Edinburgh Award for 2011. He is the fifth person to receive
the Award, which was established in 2007 by the City of Edinburgh Council to honour an
outstanding individual who has made a positive impact on the city and gained national and
international recognition for Edinburgh. Higgs was presented with an engraved loving
cup by the Rt Hon George Grubb, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, in a ceremony held at the City
Chambers on Friday 24 February 2012. The event also marked the unveiling of his handprints
in the City Chambers quadrangle, where they had been engraved in Caithness stone alongside
those of previous Edinburgh Award recipients. Prof Higgs was awarded with the Freedom of
the City of Bristol in July 2013. In April 2014, he was also awarded the Freedom of the
City of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was also honoured with a brass plaque installed on the Newcastle
Quayside as part of the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative Local Heroes Walk of Fame.
Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics On 6 July 2012, Edinburgh University announced
a new centre named after Professor Higgs to support future research in theoretical physics.
The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics brings together scientists from around the world
to seek "a deeper understanding of how the universe works". The centre is currently based
within the James Clerk Maxwell Building, home of the University's School of Physics and
Astronomy. The university has also established a chair of theoretical physics in the name
of Peter Higgs. Nobel Prize in Physics
On 8 October 2013, it was announced that Peter Higgs and François Englert would share the
2013 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". Higgs did not know he had won the
prize until a woman congratulated him in the street, since he did not have a mobile phone
or any way of being contacted. Companion of Honour
Higgs turned down a knighthood in 1999, but in 2012 he accepted membership of The Order
of the Companion of Honour. A Guardian interview with the physicist later stated that he only
accepted the order because he was wrongly assured that the award was in the gift of
the Queen alone. He also expressed cynicism towards the honours system, and the way the
system "is used for political purposes by the government in power". The order confers
no title or precedence, but recipients of the order are entitled to use the post-nominal
letters CH. In the same interview he also stated that when people ask what the CH after
his name stands for, he replies "it means I'm an honorary Swiss." He received the order
from the Queen at an investiture at Holyrood House on 1 July 2014.
Honorary Degree DSc, University of St Andrews, 2014
Cultural references
A portrait of Higgs was painted by Ken Currie in 2008. Commissioned by the University of
Edinburgh, it was unveiled on 3 April 2009 and hangs in the entrance of the James Clerk
Maxwell Building of the School of Physics and Astronomy and the School of Mathematics.
Political and religious views Higgs was an activist in the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament while in London and later in Edinburgh, but resigned his membership
when the group extended its remit from campaigning against nuclear weapons to campaigning against
nuclear power too. He was a Greenpeace member until the group opposed genetically modified
organisms. Higgs was awarded the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics,
but he refused to fly to Jerusalem to receive the award because it was a state occasion
attended by the then president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, and Higgs is opposed to Israel's
actions in Palestine. Higgs was actively involved in the Edinburgh
University branch of the Association of University Teachers, through which he agitated for greater
staff involvement in the management of the physics department.
Higgs is an atheist. He has described Richard Dawkins as having adopted a “fundamentalist”
view of non-atheists. Higgs expressed later that he was displeased that the Higgs particle
is nicknamed the "God particle", as he believes the term "might offend people who are religious".
Usually this nickname for the Higgs boson is attributed to Leon Lederman, the author
of the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, but
the name is the result of the insistence of Lederman's publisher: Lederman had originally
intended to refer to it as the "goddamn particle". Family life
Higgs has two sons — Chris, a computer scientist, and Jonny, a jazz musician. He
also has two grandchildren, and all live in Edinburgh.
See also University of Edinburgh School of Physics
and Astronomy References
Further reading Overbye, Dennis. A Pioneer as Elusive as His
Particle, The New York Times website, September 15, 2014. Also published in print on September
16, 2014, on page D1 of the New York edition. External links
Quotations related to Peter Higgs at Wikiquote Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics
Google Scholar List of Papers by PW Higgs BBC profile of Peter Higgs
The god of small things – An interview with Peter Higgs in The Guardian
My Life as a Boson – A Lecture by Peter Higgs available in various formats
Physical Review Letters – 50th Anniversary Milestone Papers
In CERN Courier, Steven Weinberg reflects on spontaneous symmetry breaking
Physics World, Introducing the little Higgs Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble
Mechanism on Scholarpedia History of Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble
Mechanism on Scholarpedia Sakurai Prize Videos
«I wish they hadn't dubbed it "The God Particle"» Interview with Peter Higgs
Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system