Who is Prof Peter Higgs? Everything you need to know about the Tyneside born physicist

08:00, 11 OCT 2016
BY MIKE KELLY

He’s had a scientific tiff with Stephen Hawking, dislikes the ‘God particle’ nickname for his Nobel prize winning theory and thinks fame is a bit of a nuisance.

So who is Peter Higgs?

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And his big idea was..?

The Higgs boson, the so-called God particle (cue cries of anguish at the name, including Prof Higgs, more of which later), which provides mass to the most basic building blocks of matter. Without it, the Standard Model theory that combines all the fundamental forces and particles of the universe would have fallen down. Higgs predicted the existence of the particle while working at Edinburgh University in 1964.



A general view inside CERN building 40 with its scale photo of The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment which is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/who-prof-peter-higgs-everything-12003941