Peter Higgs and His Nobel

Peter Higgs (84), a Scottish scientist was awarded a Nobel in 2013 in Physics which he shared with the French physicist Francois Englert. In 1964, he had predicted the Higgs boson, also called the God particle. Higgs theory belongs to a fundamental question: Where does the mass of universe come from? Higgs used the known rules of physics, from electromagnetism to quantum mechanics. Higgs raised the possibility of an unstable sub-atomic particle which could lend mass to other particles through a series of fizzing interactions. He predicted this unstable particle would be a boson, a notably massive subatomic particle that holds matter together. Boson would exist in an energy field that enabled the interactions. Boson could be confirmed for which Higgs suggested a path to confirm boson’s existence and measure the products of its decay.

Ultimately, the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) found confirmation for the boson’s decay products in 2012. It has solved at least some of the mysteries of the universe since mid-20th century. There are many more mysteries of the universe the answers of which are still out of reach or elusive.

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