![]() ![]() Before giving a talk at Harvard in 1966, a senior physicist, the late Sidney Coleman, told his class some idiot was coming to see them. ![]() In the penultimate sentence was the first mention of what became known as the Higgs boson.Īt first, there was plenty of resistance to Higgs's theory. Indignant at the decision, Higgs added two paragraphs to the paper and published it in a rival US journal instead. To his dismay the article was rejected, ironically by an editor at Cern. He published a short note in September 1964 and swiftly wrote a more expansive follow-up paper. #Peter higgs how to#The theory in question was clearly wrong, but Higgs saw why and how to fix it. But his doggedness paid off.Īt the time an argument was raging in the field over a way that particles might gain their masses. Higgs's great discovery came at Edinburgh University, where he was considered an outsider for plugging away at ideas that many physicists had abandoned. "In the long run it turned out, when it was actually graded, that Peter had done a better paper than the original they took from the literature." "Peter sailed ahead, took it seriously, thought about it, and in that six-hour time scale had managed to solve it, had written it up and presented it," said Michael Fisher, a friend from Kings.īut getting the right answer was only the start. He was the first to sit a six-hour theory exam at Kings College London, and for the want of a better idea, his tutors posed him a question that had recently been solved in a leading physics journal. #Peter higgs series#Higgs found that he was not cut out for experiments, a fact driven home by a series of sometimes dramatic mishaps, but at university he proved himself a formidable theorist. Through Dirac, Higgs came to relish the arcane world of theoretical physics. He learned that Paul Dirac was a founding father of quantum theory, and the closest Britain had to an Einstein. Higgs wondered who PAM Dirac was and read up on the former pupil. ![]() While standing around at the back of morning assembly Higgs noticed a name that appeared more than once on the school's honours board. The best teachers were off at war, and that no doubt contributed to his attitude. To the teenage Higgs, physics lacked excitement. He won prizes in a haul of subjects – although not, as it happens, in physics. One of the first things he did was tumble into a crater left by a second world war bomb in the playground and fracture his left arm. There, Higgs enrolled at what is now Cotham School. His father, a BBC sound engineer, brought the family south to Birmingham and then onwards to Bristol. "He didn't produce a great deal, but what he did produce is actually quite profound and is one of the keystones of what we now understand as the fundamental building blocks of nature," Walker said. Higgs plays down his role in developing the idea, but there is no dismissing the importance of the theory itself. Before 1964, the question of why the simplest particles weighed anything at all was met with an embarrassed but honest shrug. He outlined what came to be known as the Higgs mechanism, an explanation for how elementary particles, which make up all that is around us, gained their masses in the earliest moments after the big bang. It was an era when the tools of the trade were pencil and paper. Higgs, now professor emeritus at Edinburgh, made his breakthrough the same year Feynman won the Nobel. "You meet many physicists who will tell you how good they are. "He's modest and actually almost to a fault," said Alan Walker, a fellow physicist at Edinburgh University, who sat next to Higgs at Cern when scientists revealed they had found the particle. But while Feynman was a showman who adored attention, Higgs is happy when eclipsed by the particle that bears his name, the elusive boson that scientists at Cern's Large Hadron Collider triumphantly discovered last year. Higgs, 84, is no household name, but he is closer to being one than any Nobel physics laureate since Richard Feynman, the Manhattan project scientist, who accepted the award reluctantly in 1964. ![]()
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