Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called "god particle" that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh said Tuesday. The university, where Higgs was emeritus professor, said he died Monday "peacefully at home following a short illness." Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle—the so-called Higgs boson—in 1964. But it would be almost 50 years before the particle's existence could be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider. More from the AP:
- Higgs' theory related to how subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter get their mass. This theoretical understanding is a central part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.