Physicist Peter Higgs, who shed light on dark stuff, died at 94

Born in the United Kingdom, theoretical physicist Peter Higgs passed away in 2013. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on the origins of cosmic mass. Higgs was awarded the trophy in 2013 in honor of his discovery. He was a 94-year-old man. 

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The University of Edinburgh announced his death at home on April 8, and he was an emeritus professor there. "Higgs was a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us," vice chancellor and principal of the university Peter Mathieson said. Mathieson said that Higgs was an exceptional individual.

For their work in suggesting the existence of the Higgs boson particle—now simply known as the Higgs boson—and the invisible field in space that gives mass to all matter, Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The boson was discovered in 2012 and made public by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The Large Hadron Collider is a subterranean laboratory in Geneva that collects data on the interaction of protons smashed together at almost the speed of light.

After Higgs's hypotheses were published almost fifty years ago in Physics Letters, they were written off as having "no obvious relevance to physics." The discovery supported Higgs' predictions.

His study, together with independent predictions of a similar nature by Englert and colleague Robert Brout, led to a major discovery in science over the last century. About 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, which still baffles cosmologists. The answer to solving this riddle may lie in the concept of the "God particle," which American physicist Leon Lederman coined in his book of the same name to characterize the creative powers of the boson field.

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The Higgs boson, a particle that quickly collapses into nothingness, was added to the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the nature of matter and its interactions with other particles. Without mass, nothing could take shape; particles might simply take off into space.