Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs was born to a Scottish mother and English father in Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929. He moved to Bristol when he was a child and he went to Cotham Grammar School in the 1940s. It was here that he was inspired by the work of Paul Dirac, one of the school’s alumni. Dirac was a founder of the field of quantum mechanics. This sparked Higgs' interest and he moved to London in 1946 to study physics and went on to complete a PhD focused on molecular physics.

Higgs work involved the study of mass. He puzzled as to why objects around us weigh anything. Until this point, few people had even questioned the where mass came from. Higgs began work on the idea that an invisible field encompasses the whole universe, giving subatomic particles mass. He continued this work by suggesting that particles had been massless when the universe began, but then acquired mass by interacting with a theoretical field (Higgs field). Around the same time, Robert Brout and François Englert, Gerald Guralnike, C. R. Hagen and Tim Kibble wrote papers with similar conclusions. These ideas exploded into the world of physics and in 2012, the existence of the Higgs particle was confirmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider laboratory. Due to this discovery, Higgs, alongside François Englert, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013.

Higgs taught for many year at University of Edinburgh, where was an Emeritus professor. He had an illustrious career as a physician holding positions in many societies, until his retirement in 1996.

Towards the end of his life Higgs lived with his family in Edinburgh. Once a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace, he was actively involved in global political issues throughout his life.