In praise of Peter Higgs

Dr Higgs’s best-known bright idea was arcane but crucial. There are two types of fundamental particles, fermions and bosons. The symmetrical nature of the equations which describe bosons implies that they should be massless. By the 1950s, though, it seemed that some bosons did have mass; some fundamental symmetries were in practice “broken”. Untangling the maths of broken symmetries became a preoccupation of particle physicists. Dr Higgs’s contribution, made over a few weeks in the summer of 1964, was a mathematical description of a new boson that could give mass to bosons in need of it.