10/09/13

Permalink Peter Higgs Never Imagined That He'd Live to See This Day

One day, when Peter Higgs was a 34-year-old physicist studying at the University of Edinburgh, he came up with an idea. It was a bold one, an ambitious one, and an extremely complex one. He wrote two papers about it — pencil scribbled on paper. The second paper was turned down; the editors said the theory was "of no obvious relevance to physics." His colleagues even told him he did not grasp the fundamentals of the field. Fifty years later, 84-year-old Higgs achieved the Nobel Prize in Physics for that one idea, on Tuesday morning.

It all started on a hike in the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, when Higgs had an inspiration: There had to be an energy field strewn across the universe that would give mass to certain particles and leave others massless. He submitted the paper to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). That editor probably came to seriously regret rejecting that paper. Apparently, he had not yet grasped the path Higgs was embarking upon, that the young physicist was beginning to formulate the mechanism that endows the building blocks of the universe with mass, a fundamental property of all matter. Higgs was in the early stages of finding a crucial puzzle piece; he was beginning to solve a mystery that nagged physicists for decades.

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