Physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, which earned him a Nobel Prize, died at the age of 94, according to the University of Edinburgh on Tuesday.
The university, where Higgs was an emeritus professor, said he breathed his last on Monday “at home following a short illness”.
In 1964, Higgs put forward the concept of the Higgs boson, a breakthrough that was only confirmed nearly half a century later when it was detected at the Large Hadron Collider.
His theory pertained to the mechanism by which subatomic particles, the fundamental components of matter, acquire mass.
This theoretical framework constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Standard Model, elucidating the construction of the physical world.
Recognising his seminal contributions, Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, jointly with Francois Englert of Belgium.
Peter Mathieson, the Vice Chancellor of Edinburgh University, hailed Higgs as an extraordinary figure, describing him as a profoundly gifted scientist “whose insights have deepened our comprehension of the universe”.