what you need to know about him

Nobel laureate in physics Peter Giggs died at the age of 95.

Getty Images

British theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Peter Giggs died at the age of 95.

He invented a new particle – the Higgs boson, which is also called the “God particle” in popular culture.

About the death of a scientist reported University of Edinburgh.

“Peter Giggs was an outstanding individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination enriched our knowledge of the world around us. His pioneering work has inspired thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many generations to come.”– noted the Director and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, Professor Sir Peter Matheson.

Peter Giggs died at home after a short illness on April 8 in Scotland.

Giggs is best known for his work in predicting the masses of subatomic particles. In 1964, a 35-year-old scientist predicted the existence of a new elementary particle – the so-called force-carrying boson, which is responsible for giving mass to other particles.

But this theory could be confirmed only 50 years later thanks to research at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN center near Geneva.

For the discovery of the boson, the scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 together with the Belgian physicist and co-author of the work Francois Engler.

The Higgs boson became the cornerstone of subsequent theories known as the Standard Model. It contains knowledge about the elementary particles and forces with the help of which nature and the universe were formed, notes The New York Times.

It is worth noting that Giggs’ first article was rejected. Then the scientist rewrote it and emphasized that the particle exists.

Seven weeks earlier, Francois Engler and Robert Braut of the Free University of Brussels created a similar theory. And after them – three more physicists Tom Kibble from Imperial College London, Carl Hagen from the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik from Brown University.

However, the share was still named after Giggs.

But the journalists of The New York Times note that the scientist was a modest man, avoided fame and preferred nature.

He ignored technological progress – he didn’t have a television, he didn’t use e-mail or a mobile phone. For many years, he relied on his colleague Alan Walker, a physics professor at Edinburgh, who did the email writing and communication instead of the physicist.

Although the scientist did not consider himself a believer, he did not see a contradiction between the existence of God the creator and the discovery of an elementary particle.