Higgs Lecture 2024: Elusive - the story of Peter Higgs and his elusive boson

On July 4 2012, a fifty-year-old search ended: the elusive Higgs boson, the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and key to understanding why the universe is filled with atoms and molecules, and why the sun has burned long enough for life to have emerged, was found. Edinburgh University’s Peter Higgs, the particle’s namesake, became a virtual shoe-in for a Nobel Prize. And yet, when his name was announced sixteen months later, Higgs proved as elusive as the boson itself. Having hidden out in a seafood bar in Leith, he learned of the award from a passer-by in the street. In this popular talk, based on his biography “Elusive” of Higgs and the boson, Frank Close traces the pivotal role of Higgs's idea in the evolution of our understanding of the material universe.

Frank Close is emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Oxford University, and author of 22 popular books on the history and understanding of modern physics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society -of London :) - and won its Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013.

Copies of Elusive will hopefully be available for purchase and/or signing

For more information and to book tickets, please follow the eventbrite link here.