Unassuming physicist Professor Peter Higgs ahead of his time
For decades, Professor Peter Higgs was as unknown to most of the world as the particle that bears his name.
It was in 1964 that he dreamed up what would become known as the Higgs boson but the quiet physicist waited for science to catch up with his ground-breaking ideas for almost 50 years.
Prof Higgs’s proposal was that particles acquire mass by interacting with an all-pervading field spread throughout the universe. The more they interact, the more massive and heavy they become.
