Peter Higgs

Peter Higgs was a British theoretical physicist, born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 29 May 1929 and died on 8 April 2024, aged 94. Educated at King's College London, he spent his career at the University of Edinburgh from 1960, becoming professor of theoretical physics in 1980. His 1964 papers proposing what became known as the Higgs mechanism, the second written after a first submission was rejected, predicted a new particle that took 48 years to observe directly; by his own account he found the years of public attention that followed the 2012 confirmation and the 2013 Nobel Prize personally uncomfortable, preferring the quiet of a working physicist's life.