British physicist Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who proposed the existence of the so-called "God particle" that helped explain how matter came to be after the Big Bang, has died at the age of 95, the University of Edinburgh said on Tuesday.
The university, where Higgs was professor emeritus, said the physicist died Monday "peacefully at home after a short illness."
In 1964, Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle – the so-called Higgs boson, but almost 50 years would pass before the existence of the particle could be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider.
The Higgs theory was about how subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of the building blocks of the universe.
The University of Edinburgh stated that Higgs's groundbreaking 1964 paper showed how "the elements gain mass through the existence of a new subatomic particle" that became known as the Higgs boson.
In 2012, in one of the biggest discoveries in physics in decades, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that they had finally found the Higgs boson using a $10 billion particle collider built in a 27-kilometer-long tunnel under the Swiss- French borders.
Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, along with François Englert from Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.
Although Higgs, with his revolutionary theoretical work, helped to explain how the universe has mass, solving one of the biggest puzzles in physics, when the announcement that he had been waiting for for half a century arrived, the humble physicist was nowhere to be found, because he slipped out the back door into a pub , according to his 2022 biography "Elusive."
Higgs later admitted that the sudden fame was "a bit of a distraction".
The University of Edinburgh, where Higgs has taught and researched in various capacities since the 1950s, said the humble physicist was a "great teacher and mentor" who inspired "generations of young scientists".
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