A respectful eulogy to Peter Higgs (v1.0)

This is a respectful eulogy to Peter Higgs who passed away on 8th April 2024 at the age of 94 and a celebration of his work. I did not know him but know of his work. 

Peter Higgs was born 29th May 1929 in Newcastle on Tyne in England. He was a British theoretical Physics professor at the University of Edinburgh and was awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 2013 along with Francois Englert. They were the first to explain the origin of mass - a truly fundamental breakthrough. How much more fundamental than that can you get?!! All known particles, except photons, need some mass in order to bind to each other and form the structures, like atoms, that comprise our physical world. “Without Higgs’ work we wouldn’t understand why there are atoms. Some pretty basic features of our world would not be understandable,” says John Ellis at King’s College London in the UK.

Professor Higgs arrived at 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 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 1974. He was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. Higgs was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) in 1991. He was awarded the Rutherford medal and prize in 1984.He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh. 

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 (which became known as the Higgs Field). Mass is really a measure of inertia which was a concept first introduced by Galileo Galilei and generalized by Rene Descartes. The actual term was introduced by Johannes Kepler. The term Moment of Inertia was finally introduced by Leonhard Euler in 1765 for rotational inertia. Higgs postulated that the Higgs field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. The Higgs field confers mass on quarks and leptons (an electron is a lepton). Quarks cause only a tiny portion of the masses though of other compound subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass. 

He wrote a paper in 1964 in Physical review Letters describing a theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism) and predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs Boson). The Higgs boson is an elementary particle that is a manifestation of the Higgs field. For another example, that may be more familiar, the elementary particle that is a manifestation of the electromagnetic field is the photon (Electromagnetic interactions occur between particles with electric charge via electromagnetic fields. Richard Feynman's quantum electrodynamics - QED - rests on the idea that charged particles interact electromagnetically by emitting and absorbing photons, the particles that transmit electromagnetic forces in the field). Other physicists, Robert Brout and Francois Englert and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble had reached similar conclusions at about the same time. In the published version Higgs quotes the second paper by 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.

The Higgs boson was experimentally verified on July 4, 2012. On that momentous day, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN independently observed a new particle with a mass around 125 GeV, which was consistent with the predicted properties of the Higgs Boson. Prof Higgs wiped away a tear when the historic significance of the findings became apparent during the announcement at a seminar at the CERN headquarters. This discovery marked the end of a nearly 50-year hunt for this elusive particle, and it had a profound impact on our understanding of the origin of mass in subatomic particles.

The Higgs boson is often called the "God" particle in popular literature and Peter Higgs hated that moniker!!

Professor Higgs made huge contributions. May he rest in peace.