Peter Higgs

Physicist

Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom on May 29th, 1929 and is the Physicist. At the age of 95, Peter Higgs biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.

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Date of Birth
May 29, 1929
Nationality
United Kingdom
Place of Birth
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
Age
95 years old
Zodiac Sign
Gemini
Profession
Theoretical Physicist
Peter Higgs Height, Weight, Eye Color and Hair Color

At 95 years old, Peter Higgs physical status not available right now. We will update Peter Higgs's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Height
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Weight
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Hair Color
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Eye Color
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Peter Higgs Religion, Education, and Hobbies
Religion
Not Available
Hobbies
Not Available
Education
King's College London, University of London (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Peter Higgs Spouse(s), Children, Affair, Parents, and Family
Spouse(s)
Jody Williamson ​(m. 1963)​
Children
2
Dating / Affair
Not Available
Parents
Not Available
Peter Higgs Career

After finishing his doctorate, Higgs was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (1954–56). He then held various posts at Imperial College London, and University College London (where he also became a temporary lecturer in Mathematics). 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. He was promoted to Reader, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 1974 and was promoted to a Personal Chair of Theoretical Physics in 1980. He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Higgs was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) in 1991. He was awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1984. He received an honorary degree from the University of Bristol in 1997. In 2008 he received an Honorary Fellowship from Swansea University for his work in particle physics.

At Edinburgh Higgs first became interested in mass, developing the idea that particles – massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result of interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it.

The Higgs mechanism postulates the existence of the Higgs field which confers mass on quarks and leptons. However this causes only a tiny portion of the masses of other subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. In these, gluons that bind quarks together confer most of the particle mass.

The original basis of Higgs' work came from the Japanese-born theorist and Nobel Prize laureate Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago. Professor Nambu had proposed a theory known as spontaneous symmetry breaking based on what was known to happen in superconductivity in condensed matter; however, the theory predicted massless particles (the Goldstone's theorem), a clearly incorrect prediction.

Higgs is reported to have developed the fundamentals of his theory after returning to his Edinburgh New Town apartment from a failed weekend camping trip to the Highlands. He stated that there was no "eureka moment" in the development of the theory. He wrote a short paper exploiting a loophole in Goldstone's theorem (massless Goldstone particles need not occur when local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory) and published it in Physics Letters, a European physics journal edited at CERN, in Switzerland, in 1964.

Higgs wrote a second paper describing a theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism), but the paper was rejected (the editors of Physics Letters judged it "of no obvious relevance to physics"). Higgs wrote an extra paragraph and sent his paper to Physical Review Letters, another leading physics journal, which published it later in 1964. This paper predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs boson). Other physicists, Robert Brout and François Englert and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble had reached similar conclusions about the same time. In the published version Higgs quotes Brout and Englert and the third paper quotes the previous ones. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert were each recognised as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration. While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers are noteworthy. The mechanism had been proposed in 1962 by Philip Anderson although he did not include a crucial relativistic model.

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). Speaking at the seminar in Geneva, Higgs commented "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime." Ironically, this probable confirmation of the Higgs boson was made at the same place where the editor of Physics Letters rejected Higgs' paper.

Source

FBI agents are probing the sale in America of hundreds of treasures suspected of being stolen from the British Museum

www.dailymail.co.uk, May 27, 2024
The FBI is investigating the sale to US buyers of hundreds of treasures suspected of being looted from the British Museum. The BBC spoke to an antiquities buyer in New Orleans who revealed a FBI investigator had contacted him regarding two pieces he had bought from an eBay trader using the name sultan1966. The agent said he was assisting the Metropolitan Police. Last year, a senior curator in the museum's Greece and Rome department, Dr Peter Higgs, was sacked after an investigation found 1,500 items in its collection had been stolen or damaged. The Museum believes he has stolen, damaged, melted down or sold the items on - pocketing around £100,000 in the process - and is bringing a civil case against him. According to court documents seem by the BBC, it believes he was stealing items for at least a decade, selling mostly unregistered items from the museum's storerooms. Dr Higgs, 56, from Hastings, East Sussex, denies the allegations.

British Museum recovers 268 more missing or stolen objects that have been found across the world after legal action was launched against curator and director resigned

www.dailymail.co.uk, May 18, 2024
The shocking revelation that objects had been stolen or missing from the world famous museum led to the resignation of the then director Hartwig Fischer (pictured top left) in August 2023. Meanwhile, legal proceedings began in March against former curator, Dr Peter Higgs (pictured top right), over items which allegedly were damaged or went missing under his watch. On Friday the museum announced that a total of 626 items, out of around 1,500 missing or stolen objects, had been found and returned to London. These precious objects were found across the world including as far away as North America. A last update from the museum in February stated that more than 350 artefacts had been returned after the objects, which included classical Greek and Roman gems and jewelry, were taken.

Brian Cox leads tributes for 'visionary' Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Peter Higgs famed for predicting the Higgs boson 'God particle' after his death aged 94

www.dailymail.co.uk, April 9, 2024
Brian Cox (right) has led tributes to 'visionary' Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Peter Higgs (left) who predicted the Higgs boson 'God particle' - after his death aged 94. Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for his work that led to the discovery of the subatomic particle - which bears his name, explaining why particles have mass. TV scientist Professor Brian Cox led tributes to the great physicist, writing on X/Twitter this evening: 'Very sorry to hear Peter Higgs has died.