To the Memories of Peter Higgs

Have you heard of Peter Higgs before?

I first learned about him during my extramural lessons while preparing for my GCE in SS1. We had this teacher who was quite enthusiastic about physics.

We would finish school around 4 pm, then I would hurry home to prepare dinner and put in the cooler for everyone before rushing out to ‘lesson’. Classes ran from 5:30 pm to around 8 pm. I ended up using my GCE results to gain admission to the university. My passing in physics was probably due to the dedication of a particular physics teacher, who also taught mathematics. After classes, he allowed us hang out with him and discuss various topics in those two subjects.

It was during one of those discussions about the origin of the universe that I first heard about the ‘God particle’. It was a discussion about how the building blocks of the Universe have mass. Being a theist, the teacher’s beliefs did not make him comfortable accepting the Big Bang theory, but he was nevertheless open to explaining what the scientific community was saying about it to us. “Suppose the Big Bang happened, what changes occurred?” was how we began talking about Higgs.

In 1964, Peter Higgs, who later became an emeritus professor at Edinburgh, proposed that the universe is filled with a field called the Higgs field. After the Big Bang, there were changes…