Nobel Prize-Winning 'God Particle' Physicist Peter Higgs Dies Aged 94

Nobel prize-winning Physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of an undetected particle in the universe changed science, has died aged 94, the University of Edinburgh said on Tuesday. Edinburgh University, where Higgs held a professorial chair for many years, said he had passed away peacefully on Monday at home following a short illness.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN research centre near Geneva was widely hailed as the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over three decades and pointed physics towards ideas that were once science fiction. “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us,” said Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, the university Principal and Vice-Chancellor.

What came to be known as the Higgs boson would solve the riddle of where several fundamental particles get their mass from: by interacting with the invisible “Higgs field” that pervades space. That interaction, known as the “Brout-Englert-Higgs” mechanism, won Higgs and Belgium’s Francois Englert the Nobel prize in physics in 2013. Englert’s collaborator Robert Brout died in 2011.