Peter Higgs, physicist who shed light on dark matter, dies at 94

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Also Read: Our Solar System will die a grisly death, will be ‘crushed and ground to dust’ Higgs shared his Nobel prize with Belgian physicist Francois Englert for proposing the existence of what became known as the Higgs boson particle and the invisible field in space that gives mass to matter. The discovery of the elemental particle was announced in 2012 by European nuclear research body CERN after the boson was detected in the Large Hadron Collider, an underground laboratory near Geneva that smashes protons together at almost the speed of light and records data on their interaction.

Also Read: Solar Eclipse: ‘Why do my eyes hurt?’ tops Google search after celestial event The breakthrough corroborated the ideas of Higgs published almost half a century earlier, when they were dismissed in the journal Physics Letters as having “no obvious relevance to physics." His work, along with similar predictions made independently by Englert and his colleague Robert Brout, led to one of the most significant scientific findings of the past century. The “God particle," a term used in US physicist Leon Lederman’s book of the same name to describe the boson field’s creative qualities, may offer insights into dark matter and dark energy, which make up about 96% of the universe and remain a mystery to cosmologists.

Also Read: Google's spectacular animation signals Total ‘Solar Eclipse’ on April 8: How to watch The Higgs boson, which decays almost instantly, completed the Standard Model of particle physics that explains how matter holds together. Without mass, particles would fly off into space, and nothing could take shape.