Understanding 'God Particle' | AFP
Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “God particle” boson, passed away aged 94. | AP
His studies helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang. Without mass from the Higgs, particles could not clump together into the matter we interact with every day. | AFP
Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson, in 1964. He theorized there must be a subatomic particle of certain dimension that would explain how other particles — and therefore all the stars and planets in the universe — acquired mass. | AFP
Without something like this particle, the set of equations physicists use to describe the world, known as the standard model, would not hold together. | AFP
Peter Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory. | AFP