The Higgs Boson is also named for God, i.e. the “God particle,” as a compromise between Leon Lederman who called it “the goddamn particle” and his publisher for the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. Higgs himself is not a fan of this formulation.
The existence of the Higgs Boson was first proposed in the 1960s, but it took decades of work to get experimental test beds to the point where it could be directly measured. It was confirmed to exist on March 14, 2013, after careful analysis of particle collision experiments at CERN. Higgs bosons are the “force carrier” particle for a fundamental field of spacetime, also called the Higgs field, the same way that photons carry force in the electroweak field. Massive fundamental particles, like quarks and electrons, have mass because they interact with the Higgs field.1 The Higgs boson itself represents a state of heavy quantum excitation in the Higgs field; because it has as much mass as a few tens of thousands of quarks, it cannot be observed as a force carrier for the mass of a quark, and it decays extremely quickly once created. The purpose of the LHC experiments, then, was to pump so much energy into the Higgs field in a small area of space that it created a Higgs boson observable from its decay products.
The physics that motivated the search for the Higgs boson goes super deep, but in a nutshell, it goes like this: the W and Z bosons, that mediate the weak nuclear force, have mass just like quarks and fermions. The prevailing quantum mechanical theories of the 1960s predicted that these particles should be massless to preserve symmetry with photons (which are massless). To break the symmetry between them, one would have to explain the nature of the break. The best prediction came from the idea that there was a field whose lowest energy state had a positive value in its effect.2 This is the Higgs field
Peter Higgs is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Edinburgh. He received all of his degrees, up to a Ph.D. in 1954, from King’s College, London. He had a brief postdoctorate stint at Edinburgh, then at Imperial College London and University College London, before returning to Edinburgh for a permanent position in 1960. The groundbreaking work that led to the search for the Higgs boson was just one of five or six independent efforts to build on previous symmetry breaking theories that predicted massless bosons; these papers are collectively known as the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers. Higgs and another of these authors, François Englert, together received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.
Higgs is known for a certain degree of pragmatic political activism in addition to his physics work. He was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament until it started campaigning against nuclear power, and in Greenpeace before it started campaigning against GMOs. He turned down a knighthood in 1999 due to a general wariness of governmental honors, but later accepted membership in the Order of the Companions of Honour, an honor that carries no title or precedence. The University of Edinburgh established a theoretical physics department and chair in his name, and he seems to be OK with that.
- 99% of the mass of baryons (protons and neutrons) comes from the energy bound between their constituent quarks via the strong nuclear force; even though gluons (the force carriers of the strong nuclear force) have no rest mass of their own, they carry the energy of the strong force and thus provide the mass of the baryon via mass-energy equivalence. The remaining ~1% is from the rest mass of the quarks themselves, which comes from the Higgs field interaction with the quarks. ↩︎
- This doesn’t make intuitive sense, but you could liken it to gravity, which accelerates massive objects towards each other unless you apply a countering force. You have to add energy to the system for gravity to have zero effect. ↩︎