Peter Higgs (1929-2024)
"The British scientist who changed the world of physics has died, aged 94 "
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013 for his revolutionary work, Peter Higgs died this Monday in Edinburgh.
With a portfolio that motivated thousands of scientists, Higgs legacy will continue to inspire many more generations to come.
Photo credits: © Claudia Marcelloni / CERN
Peter Higgs was a remarkable scientist who made an important contribution to science. In particular, he contributed to the construction of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which seeks to explain the fundamental constituents of the universe and their interactions. The construction of this model took decades, involving theoretical and experimental physicists, and the last piece of the puzzle to be discovered was precisely the particle known as the Higgs boson - discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, using proton collision data from CERN's large hadron collider, the LHC. This discovery closed a chapter, but opened many others, since we are still measuring the properties of the Higgs boson precisely and exploring what role it might play in possible new phenomena, which have not yet been observed.
The almost fifty years between the proposal of the Brout-Englert-Higgs and the discovery of the Higgs boson associated with it, are an excellent example of the timings in science, sometimes not very compatible with the immediacy so much in vogue today, but also of the long-term collaboration between thousands of scientists from all over the world, who have worked tirelessly towards a common goal and shared the universal language and methods of science. May this example inspire us for the future, knowing that there is still around 95% of the matter and energy in the universe of which we know practically nothing. May we, as humanity, continue the legacy of great scientists such as Peter Higgs and many others, who never gave up looking for answers to the great questions of the universe, working together at the forefront of science and technology.
- Nuno Castro, director of LIP, for O Público
Ricardo Gonçalo, diretor of LIP, for Antena 1 (10:45).