Peter Higgs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Higgs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:  Peter Ware Higgs CH FRS FRSE (born 29 May 1929) 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 (which was often described as "the most sought-after particle in modern physics"). 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 (although previously, composite scalars such as the K* had been observed over half a century prior). 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.

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 is an atheist. He has described Richard Dawkins as having adopted a “fundamentalist” view of non-atheists, (although Higgs had said that Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself). 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".