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The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Credit: CERN
Peter Higgs gave the name to the elementary particle known as the Higgs boson. passed away at the age of 94. He has always been a humble man, especially given that he is one of the greats in particle physics, a field of science concerned with the building blocks of matter.
In 1964, a few years after arriving from London to take up a post at the University of Edinburgh, Mr. Higgs read the paper It was written by American theoretical physicist Philip Anderson. At the time, physicists had no theory about how elementary particles acquire mass. (Mass can be described as the total amount of matter in an object, while weight is the force of gravity acting on an object.)
Anderson’s paper showed that particles can have mass. In physics, when a system (such as two different elementary particles) changes, physicists sometimes describe it as having a “broken symmetry.” This can lead to the emergence of new properties.
While walking in the Scottish Highlands, Higgs had an idea for a lifetime.he figured out exactly how to apply it broken symmetry He had read in Anderson’s paper about an important group of particles called . gauge boson. It would lead to an explanation of how the components of matter acquire their mass.
Around the same time, two other groups of physicists had the same idea. Robert Brodt and François Unglert from Brussels, and Carl Hagen, Gerald Granik and Tom Kibble from Imperial College London.
retrofit idea
The main distinguishing feature of Higgs’ contribution is that he predicted, as an afterthought, the existence of new concepts. Large amount of particles left over from the process He was training at Highland. This particle would later be named the Higgs boson.
I think it was always a bit perplexing to Higgs that this symmetry-breaking mechanism is sometimes shortened to: “Higgs mechanism”. He was always quick to point out everyone else’s contributions, preferring the term “Anderson-Blut-Englert-Higgs-Hagen-Guralnik-Kibble mechanism.”
Over the next few decades, it became clear how important the contributions of these scientists were to our understanding of particle physics. Especially since the particle named after the Higgs turned out to be extremely elusive.Some machines called particles colliderbuilt to explore the limits of our knowledge in physics.
They investigated and tested the most widely accepted theories to explain how forces interact with fundamental particles (particles that cannot be broken down into other particles). standard model. The standard model has been proven to hold true under almost all conditions. The only missing ingredient not yet discovered by the particle collider was the giant particle predicted by the Higgs.
Frustrated by how elusive the Higgs boson was proving to be, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman gave it yet another nickname. It’s a “fucking particle”. This is then Abbreviated as “God Particle”.
It took 48 years in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest machine ever built, to finally find proof that Higgs and his colleagues were right. Physicists from Cern, the organization that runs the LHC, said: almost certainly found a particle July 4, 2012.
Further experiments confirmed that this was indeed the particle predicted by the Higgs. However, when the time came, Nobel Prize in Physics Higgs, who was due to be announced in October 2013, went for a walk instead of being on the phone.
