A SCOTTISH university professor awarded the Nobel Prize for his work has died.
Professor Peter Higgs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013 and gave his name to the Higgs boson particle, passed away on Monday, April 8 aged 94.
Announcing the news, the University of Edinburgh said Higgs had died “peacefully at home following a short illness” and that his family asked that the media and public respect their privacy at this time.
Professor Peter Mathieson, the principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, said: “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.
READ MORE: Professor Peter Higgs awarded world's oldest scientific award for his 'God particle' work
“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”
The Higgs particle was first posited by Higgs in 1964 in a landmark paper he wrote while working teaching mathematical physics at Edinburgh University.
It would be confirmed by the European Council for Nuclear Research (Cern) in 2012.
Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize the following year.
A difficult concept, the Higgs boson particle is a subatomic particle which gives all particles in the universe their mass.
According to Cern’s website: “You and everything around you are made of particles. But when the universe began, no particles had mass; they all sped around at the speed of light.
“Stars, planets and life could only emerge because particles gained their mass from a fundamental field associated with the Higgs boson.
“The existence of this mass-giving field was confirmed in 2012, when the Higgs boson particle was discovered at Cern.”
It goes on: “In our current description of nature, every particle is a wave in a field. The most familiar example of this is light: light is simultaneously a wave in the electromagnetic field and a stream of particles called photons.
“In the Higgs boson's case, the field came first. The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new kind of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. Its discovery confirms the existence of the Higgs field.”
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