Peter Higgs, whose success as a physicist depends on who you ask Premium

Peter Higgs, physicist behind the poorly named "God particle," shunned fame, preferred to share credit on his most important work, and wouldn’t have been a successful physicist in the 21st century.

The day the physicist Peter Higgs passed away, April 8, Google search results were rife with headlines that the man who proposed the “God particle” was no more. Dr Higgs was famously private, having stayed away from the press for most of his career, yet while his opinions on many matters were out of view, it wasn’t a secret he didn’t want the particle named for him to be named for him alone — much less the “God particle”.

In 1964, three groups of physicists working independently all proposed the existence of an elementary particle that gave some other particles some energy, often understood as mass. (According to Albert Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, mass is energy at rest.) This energy was required to explain some observations in experiments that didn’t fit the theories of elementary particles at the time. It was considered a very difficult problem because the solution also had to follow some rules of the theory that people had worked out by then.

The particle the groups proposed was the smallest packet of energy in an energy field pervading the whole universe. When a different elementary particle enters this field, the physicists proposed a mechanism by which their particle would interact with the newcomer and give it mass. Today, the field is called the Higgs field, the particle the Higgs boson, and the mechanism the Higgs mechanism.

Based on the recent work of some other physicists, including Yoichiro Nambu and Philip Warren Anderson, Robert Brout and François Englert published their paper in August 1964. Peter Higgs followed in October (following up from a discussion he’d had with Walter Gilbert the previous month), and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble in November. So Dr Higgs said he preferred calling it the “ABEGHHK’tH mechanism”, after all the people who contributed to its theory. (The ‘’tH’ is for Gerardus ’t Hooft.)

In a rare 2013 interview, Dr Higgs said “calling it [the] ‘Higgs boson’ means choosing from a list of numerous people involved in the investigation in 1964. Nor do I agree with the statement that this all started in 1972, when someone associated my name with some characteristics of the series or the formula, and with conferences. … I would like to point out that my role has been overstated within the scientific community.”

The “God particle” label is itself a misnomer. Dr Higgs’s peer Leon Lederman had called it the “goddamn particle” in a book because it was proving so hard to find in physics experiments. Dr Lederman’s publisher changed it to “God particle” because this was more palatable, although Dr Lederman also later used it to allude to the Book of Genesis. Nonetheless, Dr Higgs later called the label a “sham” and a “joke”.

Just predicting the particle’s existence with certain properties was a big achievement, but it soon became clear finding it would be even bigger. Physicists had found a solution to the mass problem using complex mathematics but they weren’t sure that’s how nature did it too. By the 1980s, confirming this became the “central problem” in particle physics.