It's unique and is still quite mysterious. "The Higgs particle has been described in many ways. Read more: 10 or so things you should know about Albert Einstein and his theories of relativityĪnd she hints at a certain lasting mystique as well. "It is a triumph of theory and its confirmation by the ATLAS and CMS experiments were a monumental achievement in experimental physics." "The mechanism that Brout, Englert and Higgs described in landmark papers in 1964 has been a guiding thread of experimental particle physics for decades," said CERN's serving director general, Professor Fabiola Gianotti, in an email. Robert Brout had died a year before the Higgs boson discovery was revealed. He is happy to appear smaller as a scientist than the science itselfīut he did accept his Nobel Prize in 2013. Higgs shared the Prize in Physics with François Englert, who had taken a position as a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University. Peter Higgs seems quite modest despite his achievements. "Who can forget the image of Peter wiping a tear from his eye and declaring that he felt privileged to have lived to see the day?"
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"It was a day full of emotion," says Heuer. So that was a coming together of its own kind. Hagan and Guralnik, along with Tom Kibble, had reached similar conclusions in the 1960s to Brout, Englert and Higgs. Read more: European XFEL: First images of the X-ray laser inspire researchersĬarl Hagan and Gerry Guralnik were also there, he recalls. "It was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my career, and it was fantastic that we had Peter Higgs and François Englert with us that day," Heuer told us in an email. Until they had confirmed its existence, which they did in 2013. two particles colliding").īut having waited so many years, it's understandable that they should want to be cautious. It was a bit like a pathologist describing a murder scene on CSI Geneva ("Bruising consistent with. They day they detected the Higgs boson was a "career highlight" Particle physicist Rolf-Dieter Heuer was CERN director general from 2009 to 2015. There's no doubting that the entire scientific community felt the excitement at CERN when its then-director general, Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, revealed that they had detected a new particle "consistent" with a Higgs boson. "Even if current speculative ideas about dark matter, strings, etcetera, are correct, it may be many decades before experiments and instrumentalists have the capability to test those ideas." "The fact it took nearly 50 years has a lesson for the future," says Rees. Until one day when, long after Higgs' retirement from active teaching in 1996, scientists at CERN shouted "Oh, my God, it's the God Particle!" So, we'll focus on only one aspect of the problem for the purpose of this piece: It took decades for scientists to observe the Higgs boson in an experiment. Here is Higgs (L) with fellow Nobel Laureate Francois Englert in 2012 Peter Higgs was just one of many scientists who tried to explain how particles got mass. Somehow, he's managed to remain modest about it all. Read more: CERN director general says the work starts now And, luckily, this route led him to eventually make an incredible impact. Higgs started his PhD under Coulson and was later supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins. Coulson told him it was very difficult to make any impact in that area." "But Peter was advised against it by the theoretical chemist Charles Coulson.
"After graduating from King's College London in 1950, Peter was interested in doing a PhD in elementary particle physics," recalls Sir David Wallace, who did his own PhD under Higgs in Edinburgh in the 1960s. Read more: Englert, Higgs win 2013 Nobel Physics Prize The British theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate is known for predicting the existence of a very special, fundamental element of the known universe. Where everything began with a bang, rather than the words "In the beginning." Nobel Prize for 'God Particle' discoverers
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