Peter Higgs
1929 – 2024 · aged 95
British physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1929–2024)
- Born
- 29 May 1929 · Newcastle upon Tyne
- Died
- 8 Apr 2024 · Edinburgh
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 29 May 1929BornBorn in Newcastle upon Tyne
- 1974AwardFellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
- 1981AwardHughes Medal
- 1983AwardFellow of the Royal Society
- 1984AwardRutherford Medal and Prize
- 1991AwardFellow of the Institute of Physics
- 1993AwardJames Scott Prize Lectureship
- 1996 – 2024RoleProfessor emeritus
- 1997AwardHigh Energy and Particle Physics Prize
- 1997AwardHonorary doctor of the University of Bristol
- 1997AwardIOP Dirac Medal
- 1998AwardHonorary doctor of the University of Edinburgh
- 1999AwardHonorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics
- 2002AwardHonorary doctorate of the University of Glasgow
- 8 Apr 2024DiedDied in Edinburgh
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1929 – 2024).
- 1933 – 1945The Holocaust
- 19341934 FIFA World Cup
- 19361936 Summer Olympics
- 1937 – 1945Second Sino-Japanese War
- 19381938 FIFA World Cup
- 1938Munich Agreement
- 1939 – 1940Winter War
- 1939 – 1945World War II
- 1940 – 1945Auschwitz concentration camp
- 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor
- 1941 – 1945Eastern Front
- 1941Operation Barbarossa
- 1942 – 1943Battle of Stalingrad
- 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- 1945 – 1946Nuremberg trials
- 19501950 FIFA World Cup
- 1950 – 1953Korean War
- 1953 – 1959Cuban Revolution
- 19541954 FIFA World Cup
- 1955 – 1975Vietnam War
- 1956Hungarian Revolution of 1956
- 1956Suez Crisis
- 19581958 FIFA World Cup
- 1959Antarctic Treaty System
- 19621962 FIFA World Cup
- 1962Cuban Missile Crisis
- 19661966 FIFA World Cup
- 1966 – 1976Cultural Revolution
- 1968Prague Spring
- 1969Apollo 11 Moon landing
- 19721972 Summer Olympics
- 19741974 FIFA World Cup
- 19781978 FIFA World Cup
- 1978 – 1979Iranian Revolution
- 1979 – 1989Soviet–Afghan War
- 1980 – 1988Iran–Iraq War
- 19841984 Summer Olympics
- 1985Schengen Agreement
- 19891989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
- 1989Fall of the Berlin Wall
Biography
Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
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. This Higgs mechanism predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics. In 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.
For this work, Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with François Englert in 2013.
Text from the Wikipedia article Peter Higgs, CC BY-SA 4.0
About this information
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