NOBEL Prize-winning physicist Professor Peter Higgs has been awarded the world’s oldest scientific award, the Royal Society’s Copley Medal.
He was given the award for his contribution to particle physics and his work on the so-called God particle, officially known as the Higgs boson.
Previous recipients of the Copley Medal include Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
Higgs, 86, and Professor Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013 for independently discovering a mechanism that enables elementary particles to acquire mass.
Higgs was thrust into the limelight three years ago when scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at the Cern laboratory near Geneva found the particle that now bears his name. Higgs predicted the existence of the particle while working at Edinburgh University in 1964, but until the Cern discovery in 2012 it had proved impossible to track down.
“It is an honour to be the recipient this year of the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s premier award,” said Higgs.
The Copley Medal was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731 – 170 years before the first Nobel Prize. It is given for outstanding achievements in scientific research and has been awarded to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, DNA fingerprinting pioneer Alec Jeffreys and Andre Geim, who discovered grapheme.
Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said: “Peter Higgs is a most deserving winner of the Copley Medal. I congratulate him. His work, alongside that of Francois Englert, has helped shape our fundamental understanding of the world around us.
“The search for the Higgs boson completely ignited the public’s imagination, hopefully inspiring the next generation of scientists.
“The Copley Medal is the highest honour the Royal Society can give a scientist and Peter Higgs joins the ranks of the world’s greatest-ever scientists.”
Higgs theorised that an invisible field strewn across space gave mass to every object in the universe, and the concept sparked a 40-year hunt for the “boson” particle needed to carry and transmit the field’s effect.
His theory was initially met with suspicion and ridicule in some circles. A scientific journal rejected his first paper, and some peers accused him and some of his colleagues of failing to grasp the basic principles of physics.
“Nobody else took what I was doing seriously, so nobody would want to work with me,” Higgs said. “I was thought to be a bit eccentric and maybe cranky.”
The son of a BBC sound engineer from Newcastle has never been comfortable with the fame his theory brought him.
He graduated with a first-class honours degree in physics from King’s College London in 1950. When he was denied a lectureship there, he became a researcher at Edinburgh.
After being jointly awarded the Nobel Prize, Higgs described the experience of suddenly becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world as “a bit of a nuisance”. He retired in 1996 and became emeritus professor of physics at Edinburgh University.
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