Peter Higgs, the British scientist who theorized the idea of the Higgs boson particle, passed away at the age of 94 in April 2024. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 2013 for his revolutionary idea, a year after CERN announced the discovery of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider.
It was Satyendra Nath Bose who actually figured out how a group of identical photons would behave. He then sent his paper to Albert Einstein who had the paper translated into German and published in the journal Zeitschrift fur Physik. Photons that obey the Bose-Einstein statistics are called bosons. The existence of the Higgs boson completes the standard model of particle physics.
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>Peter Higgs was a recluse in real life. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences couldn’t call him to convey the Nobel win because he did not own a cellphone. He was informed about the news by a former neighbour who happened to find him strolling on the road and stopped her car to tell him about it.
>Higgs did not even turn up for the Nobel ceremony. His colleague Francois Englert accepted the award on behalf of both.
>It was another Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman who wrote a book titled ‘The God Particle’ in the 1990s about the continuing search for Higgs boson.
>Lederman however wanted to call his book ‘The Goddamn Particle’ to describe the elusive nature of the Higg’s boson. He was persuaded by the publishers to go in for the God particle, a title that Higgs, an atheist, detested.