RIP Peter Higgs

Trying to think of something particularly relevant but failing.

Peter Higgs dies

Sad of course. Great discovery. But it sounds like he then lent in this quite hard and was difficult at work

Will there be a mass?

And Tom Kibble. My PhD supervisor. It’s the Higgs-Kibble boson if you didn’t know. There were six key people in the discovery, who published theee separate papers. Nobel prizes are limited to three recipients and only two research efforts. Of the six, one (Brout)  had died. Four were left and Higgs shared the prize with Englert. Ironically, it was the work in Tom’s seminal symmetry breaking paper that was used to calculate the mass of the Higgs-Kibble boson.

Tom was always very humble and never complained, but it is the biggest controversy after Jocelyne Bell Burnell (who discovered Pulsars as her PhD and the prize went to her supervisor). Higgs took Tom to the prize ceremony.

So someone else does the hard yards and doesn’t get the credit.  Quite a familiar theme in all walks of life.

That prompted some interesting googling

From Tom

Quote

There is arguably a plausible rationale, however, for the boson’s attribution to Peter Higgs. All of us were certainly aware that such a boson would exist, and that it would be massive, as anyone with a basic understanding of quantum field theory would have been, but Peter Higgs was undeniably the one who first pointed it out explicitly. Englert and Brout did not mention it all, no doubt thinking it too obvious, and although we did mention it we omitted to add the obvious comment that the theory would imply a non-zero mass.

Quote

Source

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/121747/tom-kibble-renaming-higgs-boson-would/

Will there be a mass?

Yes, but you can either know where it’s being held, or when, but not both.

Will there be a mass?

Yes, but I gather that the coffin and body will decay almost immediately and any pallbearers will be told that it’s imaginary mass they are carrying.