Peter Ware Higgs and the reality of our Universe.

       

        Peter Higgs is one of the most influential physicists in the modern day. After graduating from King's College with a Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. in Mathematics and Physics Higgs started his work as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburg, then went on to teach at Imperial College London and University College London as well as the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics. 

    Higg's work is primarily focused on the mechanics behind mass where he has developed a theory describing the creation of the universe. In his theory, when the universe began there was nothing, just massless particles moving around at the speed of light. These particles gained mass due to the interaction of a theoretical field that became known as the Higgs Field, which filled the entire universe. According to the  Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, particles do not have mass, instead, mass is "created" through the interaction of these particles with the Higgs field. The stronger an object acts on this field, the heavier the object becomes. This explains some oddities in our universe, such as photons of light having no mass. These Photons don't interact with the Higgs field, thus they do not have mass, while other observable elements like Protons and Electrons do, thus they have mass.

    One of the most astonishing things that can be noted about his work is that it was actually proven by CERN with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Now to fully understand what the Higgs Boson is, we would need to get into the quantum physics of it, which is beyond the scope of this blog post. But essentially the Higgs field is special in physics, as it is the only scalar field in physics that we know of. Every other field is a vector field, so it has angular momentum and spin in its particles. A Higgs particle on the other hand would have no spin since it is on a scalar field. So when CERN was able to detect the presence or at least the aftermath of its presence of a particle with no spin, they were able to confirm that it was a particle from the Higgs field, thus a Higgs Boson.