Peter Higgs

Higgs was born in the Elswick district of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to Thomas Ware Higgs (1898–1962) and his wife Gertrude Maude née Coghill (1895–1969).[13][20][21][22][23] 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 in Bristol with his mother, and was largely raised there. He attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol from 1941–46,[13][24] where he was inspired by the work of one of the school's alumni, Paul Dirac, a founder of the field of quantum mechanics.[22]

In 1946, at the age of 17, Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialised 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,[25] and performed his doctoral research in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins.[2] He was awarded a PhD degree in 1954 with a thesis entitled Some problems in the theory of molecular vibrations from King's College London.[2][13][26]

After finishing his doctorate, Higgs was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (1954–56). He 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.[27][28] He was promoted to Reader, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 1974 and was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.[6]

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 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.[29]

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). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it.[22][30]

The Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field which confers mass on quarks and leptons.[31] 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 (the Goldstone's theorem), a clearly incorrect prediction.[6]

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.[32][33][34] He stated that there was no "eureka moment" in the development of the theory.[35] He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's theorem (massless Goldstone particles need not occur when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory[36]) and published it in Physics Letters, a European physics journal edited at CERN, in Switzerland, in 1964.[37]

Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism), but the paper was rejected (the editors of Physics Letters judged it "of no obvious relevance to physics").[22] 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 (now known as the Higgs boson).[36][38] Other physicists, Robert Brout and François Englert[39] and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble[40] 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 recognised as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration.[41] 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.[36][42]

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (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 (GeV).[43] Speaking at the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."[11] Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs boson was made at the same place where the editor of Physics Letters rejected Higgs' paper.[6]

Higgs has received numerous accolades including:

Honorary Degrees

Peter Higgs portrait by Lucinda Mackay hanging at James Clerk Maxwell Foundation

Higgs has been awarded honorary degrees from the following institutions:

• DSc University of Bristol 1997[59]
• DSc University of Edinburgh 1998[59]
• DSc University of Glasgow 2002[59]
• DSc Swansea University 2008[59]
• DSc King's College London 2009[59]
• DSc University College London 2010[59]
• DSc University of Cambridge 2012[59]
• DSc Heriot-Watt University 2012[59]
• PhD SISSA, Trieste 2013[59]
• DSc University of Durham 2013[59]
• DSc University of Manchester 2013[59]
• DSc University of St Andrews 2014[59]
• DSc Free University of Brussels (ULB) 2014[59]
• DSc University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2015[59]
• DSc Queen's University Belfast 2015[59]
• ScD Trinity College Dublin 2016[59]

A portrait of Higgs was painted by Ken Currie in 2008.[60] Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh,[61] it was unveiled on 3 April 2009[62] and hangs in the entrance of the James Clerk Maxwell Building of the School of Physics and Astronomy and the School of Mathematics.[60] A large portrait by Lucinda Mackay is in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Another portrait of Higgs by the same artist hangs in the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell in Edinburgh, Higgs is the Honorary Patron of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. A portrait by Victoria Crowe was commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and unveiled in 2013.[63]

Higgs married Jody Williamson, a fellow activist with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1963. Their first son was born in August 1965.[64] Higgs's family includes two sons: Chris, a computer scientist, and Jonny, a jazz musician.[65] He has two grandchildren. The entire family lives in Edinburgh.[46]

Higgs was an activist in the CND 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.[22][66] He was a Greenpeace member until the group opposed genetically modified organisms.[66]

Higgs was awarded the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics (sharing it with Robert Brout and François Englert), 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.[67]

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.[57]

Higgs is an atheist.[68] He has described Richard Dawkins as having adopted a "fundamentalist" view of non-atheists.[69] Higgs expressed later that he was displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle",[70] as he believes the term "might offend people who are religious".[65] 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 suggestion of Lederman's publisher: Lederman had originally intended to refer to it as the "goddamn particle".[71]

• Official website
• 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
• Peter Higgs on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2013 Evading the Goldstone Theorem