Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh,[7][8] and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

[9][10] In 1964, Higgs was the single author of one of the three milestone papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that proposed that spontaneous symmetry breaking in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular.

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.

The original basis of Higgs's work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize laureate Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago.

Nambu had proposed a theory known as spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in superconductivity in condensed matter, which incorrectly predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem).

[7] Higgs reportedly developed the fundamentals of his theory after returning to his Edinburgh New Town apartment from a failed weekend camping trip to the Highlands.

[35][37] Other physicists, Robert Brout and François Englert[38] and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble[39] had reached similar conclusions at about the same time.

[35][41] 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).

[44] Higgs was presented with an engraved loving cup by the Rt Hon George Grubb, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, in a ceremony held at the City Chambers on Friday, 24 February 2012.

The event also marked the unveiling of his handprints in the City Chambers quadrangle, where they had been engraved in Caithness stone alongside those of previous Edinburgh Award recipients.

[50] On 6 July 2012, Edinburgh University announced a new centre named after Professor Higgs to support future research in theoretical physics.

The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics brings together scientists from around the world to seek "a deeper understanding of how the universe works".

[51] The centre is currently based within the James Clerk Maxwell Building, home of the university's School of Physics and Astronomy and the iGEM 2015 team (ClassAfiED).

[52][53] On 8 October 2013, it was announced that Higgs and François Englert would share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".

[54] Higgs admitted he had gone out to avoid the media attention[55] so he was informed he had been awarded the prize by an ex-neighbour on his way home, since he did not have a mobile phone.

[66] Higgs married Jody Williamson, an American lecturer in linguistics at Edinburgh and a fellow activist with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND),[67] in 1963.

[75] Although it has been reported that he believed the term "might offend people who are religious",[69] Higgs stated that this is not the case, lamenting the letters he has received which claim the God particle was predicted in the Torah, the Qur'an and Buddhist scriptures.

If they believe that story about creation in seven days, are they being intelligent?The nickname for the Higgs boson is usually attributed to Leon M. Lederman, the author of the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?