London —Physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of an undetected particle in the universe changed science and was vindicated by a Nobel prize-winning discovery half a century later, has died aged 94, the University of Edinburgh said on Tuesday. Higgs described himself as “incompetent” in the physics laboratory at school and at first preferred maths and chemistry. What came to be known as the Higgs boson would solve the riddle of where several fundamental particles get their mass from: by interacting with the invisible “Higgs field” that pervades space. That interaction, known as the “Brout-Englert-Higgs” mechanism, won Higgs and Belgium’s Francois Englert the Nobel prize in physics in 2013. CERN’s massive Large Hadron Collider finally proved to be the sledgehammer needed to crack the nut, and in 2012 two experiments there independently found the Higgs boson.

---

Persons: Peter Higgs, Higgs, “ Peter Higgs, ”, Sir Peter Mathieson, Paul Dirac, Belgium’s Francois Englert, Robert Brout, “, Rolf Heuer, welling, theoreticians, Jody Williamson, ’ ”, Robert Evans, Tom Miles, Farouq Suleiman, Pravin Char, Mark Heinrich Organizations: London, University of Edinburgh, CERN, Reuters, “, Edinburgh University, Fermilab, Collider, chuckling Locations: Geneva, Chicago, American, Edinburgh