| Peter Higgs AKA Peter Ware Higgs Born: 29-May-1929
Birthplace: Newcastle, England
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Physicist Nationality: England
Executive summary: Higgs boson and Higgs field The Standard Model, the sum total of centuries of physicists' work in attempting to understand the universe, remains an unfinished work, but nothing conclusively explains why particles have mass. Something must generate the masses of particles, and one explanation was proposed by particle physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Other physicists call it the Higgs field, while Higgs himself calls it "the so-called Higgs field" -- a theoretical area that permeates space and endows all elementary sub-atomic particles with mass through its interactions with them. In Standard Model physics, particles are associated with fields -- quarks and leptons make up matter, and vector bosons carry forces -- and the theoretical particle associated with the undiscovered Higgs field is called the Higgs boson (Higgs calls it the scalar boson).
Some physicists have gone so far as to describe the Higgs boson as a "God particle" that might lead to a unified "theory of everything". Among the skeptics, however, is Stephen Hawking, who placed wagers with other physicists betting that the Higgs boson would not be discovered during a long and expensive effort using the large electron positron particle accelerator at the CERN laboratories in Geneva. Hawking won that gamble in 2001, when the CERN effort ended without success, but most particle physicists remain confident that Higgs' ideas will eventually be proven true, as they fit the Standard Model so perfectly.
Wife: Jody Williamson Higgs (linguist, b. 1936, dated 1960-62, m. 1962, div., d. 2008, two children)
Son: Christopher Higgs (b. circa 1966)
Son: Jonathan Higgs (b. circa 1969
High School: Cotham Grammar School, Bristol, England
High School: City of London School, London, England
University: PhD, King's College London (1955)
Teacher: University of London (1955-60)
Teacher: Physics, University of London (1960-80)
Professor: Theoretical Physics, University of Edinburgh (1980-)
Wolf Prize in Physics 2004
Hughes Medal 1981
European Physical Society
Royal Society
Royal Society of Edinburgh
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