With the passing of Nobel prize-winning physicist, Peter Higgs, we reflect on the importance of ‘the God particle’, the Higgs boson. We asked some of the world’s leading thinkers and physicists for their thoughts on Higgs and the legacy of his work. The story of Peter Higgs and his Higgs boson is one that lays bare the power of theory and wonder of the experiments that are built to test them.

A modest giant of particle physics has left us.

Peter Higgs got his Bachelor’s degree at King’s College London in 1950, and his PhD for research in molecular physics in 1954. His research interests shifted subsequently to quantum field theory, leading in 1964 to his famous papers describing how elementary particles could acquire masses and predicting the existence of the particle that bears his name. In 1967 his theory of mass was incorporated into a unified theory of fundamental interactions, which is the basis of the Standard Model that describes all the visible matter in the Universe. Confirmation of Peter Higgs’s theory had to wait for the discovery of the Higgs boson, which was made at CERN in 2012 by two international teams of experimental physicists.