How Peter Higgs revealed the forces that hold the universe together

The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that shares his name

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

11 April 2024

Peter Higgs at the Science Museum in London in 2013

Photo by Andy Rain/EPA/Shutterstock

Peter Higgs lived a singular life. He developed a physics theory that stood a chance of radically advancing our understanding of the universe, and lived to see generations of experimentalists chase after and eventually triumphantly corroborate his work in the lab. He died in his home at age 94.

“Without Higgs’s work, we wouldn’t understand why there are atoms. Some pretty basic features of our world would not be understandable,” says John Ellis at King’s College London.

Peter Higgs, physicist who theorised the Higgs boson, has died aged 94

Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012

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Higgs started that work at the University of Edinburgh in the UK in the 1960s. He was thinking about a branch of physics called quantum field theory, and in July of 1964, he took about a week to write a short paper on the topic. Physics Letters accepted the study but rejected Higgs’s more detailed follow-up work just a week later. Even though Physical Review Letters eventually published a revised version of the second paper, it received no fanfare and remained overlooked for years.

Ironically, these papers contained a key ingredient that was sorely lacking from the theory of all particles in the universe: the reason why they have mass.