Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs was a British theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh who in 1964 published a solo paper in Physical Review Letters proposing that spontaneous symmetry breaking in electroweak theory could explain how elementary particles acquire mass. The mechanism required a new particle - later named the Higgs boson - and its detection became one of physics' defining quests. Nearly five decades later, in 2012, CERN announced they'd found it at the Large Hadron Collider. Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with François Englert for work now embedded in the Standard Model, the framework that explains why certain particles have mass at all. He died on 8 April 2024, having seen his 1960s theory become experimental fact.