Peter Ware Higgs, the physicist born on 29th of May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, to whom the Higgs boson owes its name, published the papers in 1964 which resulted in a 50 year long search for this elusive particle.
The Higgs boson was finally discovered with the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN.
Watch the video of the moment, when scientists at CERN announced the discovery of a new elementary particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson on 4th of July 2012, with Peter Higgs obviously moved to tears.
Peter Higgs himself hadn’t believed that the Higgs boson actually would be found during his lifetime.
While in July 2012 the announcement of the discovery of the new particle was rather referred to as a “Higgs-like” particle, it took almost one more year until CERN scientists officially called it the Higgs particle. The award of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs Boson and the theory behind it, the Higgs mechanism (later called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism), seemed to be inevitable.
Rarely had a Nobel Prize been awaited for so long and with so much hype. The Nobel Prize was finally awarded to Peter Higgs together with physicist François Englert in 2013
"for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".
From the announcement that he would be awarded the Nobel prize, Peter Higgs first learnt when he was out for lunch and a former neighbor meeting him on the street congratulated him on the news, his reaction: “What news?”
His public appearances are very rare. He is mostly shying away from the limelight and couldn’t be reached immediately after the prize announcement. He doesn’t even have a mobile phone. As Dennis Overbye from the New York Times wrote about Peter Higgs: "A Pioneer as Elusive as His Particle."
Watch the press conference from 11th of October, 2013 at the University of Edinburgh, with Peter Higgs, professor emeritus at Edinburgh, speaking to invited journalists and answering questions:
Asked how CERN and the large collaboration of experimental scientists who were involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson should be considered with respect to the prize, he said that it would be difficult for the Nobel committee to allocate the credit where it comes to an organization like CERN, more difficult than it would be to decide which theorists the prize should be awarded to.
And he wanted to remind that, although only two shared the prize, the theoretical work which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson involved four other physicists as well, who also contributed to the theory: Robert Brout, who already died in 2011, Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble, and Carl Hagen.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has certain strict rules when it comes to Nobel Prizes.
I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.- Peter Higgs
The recipient must be living. And no prize will be awarded to more than three individuals, and not to an organization or a collaboration of scientists. So the decision to whom the prize should be awarded to, wasn’t an easy task. It was even discussed to possibly change the rules, since other than in the past, when single scientists made discoveries on their own, modern science mostly involves large collaborations of scientists around the world.
Peter Higgs always emphasized that the outcome wasn’t an individual achievement by himself and that CERN and the vast collaboration of scientists responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson couldn’t be acknowledged enough.
In a brief statement released by the University of Edinburgh after the Nobel Prize announcement Peter Higgs had congratulated “all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle”, and he hoped “this recognition of fundamental science (would) help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.”
From the prediction of the elusive Higgs boson up to its discovery crowned by the Nobel Prize, it took nearly half a century, or as Peter Higgs put it when asked about his feelings winning the Nobel Prize:
"Well, I'm obviously delighted and rather relieved that, in a sense, it's all over - because it's been a long time coming."
For a deeper understanding of the Higgs boson and what it's all about, the underlying concepts and ideas leading to its discovery and beyond, read our eBook: "The Mystery of the Higgs Boson"