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The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Higgs’s signature achievement was to solve a conundrum about what made the physical universe possible. Sixty years on, the pioneering theoretical work he and his peers did is driving ever-deeper investigations into the past and future of the cosmos.
諾貝爾獎(Nobel Prize)得主科學家彼得•希格斯(Peter Higgs)的重大成就在於解決了一個關於物理宇宙存在的謎團。六十年過去了，他和他的同行們所做的開創性理論工作正在推動著對宇宙過去和未來的更深入探索。
Higgs’s ideas have had “a profound impact on our understanding of the universe, of matter and of mass”, said Alan Barr, professor of particle physics at Oxford university.
牛津大學粒子物理學教授艾倫•巴爾(Alan Barr)表示，希格斯的理論「對我們對宇宙、物質和質量的理解產生了深遠影響」。
Higgs, who died on Monday aged 94, had an unusual scientific life of three acts. The startling insights of his mid-thirties were followed by a lower-key remainder of his career in academia, until his retirement in 1996.
希格斯於週一去世，享年94歲。他的科學生涯非凡且獨特，可以劃分爲三個階段。他在三十多歲時的驚人洞見之後，他的學術生涯相對低調，直至1996年退休。
Then, in 2012, came confirmation of the existence of the particle known as the Higgs boson and its associated force field — just as Higgs had predicted. Now Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is considering a €16bn expansion project in part to investigate the properties of this cosmically consequential discovery.
然後，在2012年，被稱爲希格斯玻色子的粒子及其相關力場的存在得到了證實——正如希格斯所預測的那樣。現在，歐洲核子研究組織(Cern)正在考慮一項耗資160億歐元的擴建項目，部分目的是爲了研究這一具有重大宇宙意義的發現的性質。
“The concept of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson is unique in particle physics,” said Mark Thomson, professor of particle physics at Cambridge university and the UK candidate to be Cern’s next director-general. “It is unlike anything else we have seen.”
「希格斯場和希格斯玻色子的概念在粒子物理學中是獨一無二的，」劍橋大學粒子物理學教授、歐洲核子研究組織下一任總幹事的英國候選人馬克•湯姆森(Mark Thomson)說。「這與我們所見過的任何其他東西都不同。」
Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, and schooled in the West Midlands, Bristol and London. In Bristol he attended Cotham Grammar School, where stories of a former pupil named Paul Dirac inspired him. Dirac was a founding theoretician of quantum mechanics who had jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933.
希格斯於1929年出生在紐卡斯爾，曾在西米德蘭茲(West Midlands)、布里斯托爾和倫敦接受教育。在布里斯托爾，他就讀於科瑟姆文法學校(Cotham Grammar School)，那裏一位名叫保羅•狄拉克(Paul Dirac)的前學生的故事給他帶來了啓發。狄拉克是量子力學的創辦理論家，曾於1933年與他人共同獲得諾貝爾獎。
Higgs at Edinburgh university in 2013 after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Higgs stands in front of a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum in London in 2013
Peter MacDiarmid/Getty Images“I was curious about what he had done because his name appeared frequently on the roll call of the achievements of former pupils,” Higgs later recalled. “And that led me to read about atomic physics and quantum theory before I was ever taught them.”
「我對他的成就感到好奇，因爲他的名字在校友成就名單上頻繁出現，」希格斯後來回憶道。「這促使我在還未接受相關教學之前，就開始研讀原子物理學和量子理論的相關內容。」
Higgs graduated with a physics PhD from King’s College London and spent most of his academic career at Edinburgh university. At Edinburgh, he turned his mind to a fundamental puzzle. He worked in the strange realm of the subatomic, where the classical Newtonian physics of falling apples breaks down.
希格斯從倫敦國王學院(King』s College London)獲得物理學博士學位，並在愛丁堡大學度過了他的大部分學術生涯。在愛丁堡，他將思維投入到一個基本的難題中。他研究的是亞原子這個奇怪的領域，牛頓經典物理學中的蘋果落地原理在這裏被打破了。
Models of the universe of subatomic particles struggled to account for why some of them must have mass — that is, they are made of matter. This was a problem: if none of them had mass, they could not combine to create stars, planets or life forms that did.
亞原子粒子宇宙模型一直在努力解釋爲什麼其中一些粒子必須具有質量，即它們是由物質構成的。這是一個問題：如果它們都沒有質量，那麼它們就無法結合起來形成恆星、行星或有質量的生命形式。
The answer, Higgs concluded, lay in a force field that permeated the universe. He thought an as-yet unidentified particle carried a force from this field that interacted with other particles to give them mass: in a sense, it defined them.
希格斯得出的結論是，答案在於一個遍佈整個宇宙的力場。他認爲，一種尚未被識別的粒子從這個力場中帶來一種力量，這種力量與其他粒子相互作用，賦予它們質量：從某種意義上說，這種力量定義了它們。
Higgs later used the simplified analogy of a snowfield — the force field — being traversed by people — other particles — wearing skis, snowshoes and normal boots. They move at differing speeds through the area, governed by how they interact with the snow.
希格斯後來用一個簡化的比喻，將力場比作雪地，而其他粒子則像穿著滑雪板、雪鞋和普通靴子的人在雪地上行走。他們在這個區域以不同的速度移動，這取決於他們與雪的互動方式。
One of Higgs’s early papers was rejected by a scientific journal. This perhaps reflected what the researcher saw as a perception among some Edinburgh colleagues that his ideas were, as he said in an interview, “a bit eccentric, maybe cranky”.
希格斯的一篇早期論文被一家科學期刊拒絕了。這可能反映了研究者觀察到的一種看法，即他在愛丁堡的一些同事認爲他的想法，正如他在一次採訪中所說的，「有點古怪，甚至有些怪癖」。
He refined his concepts — crucially predicting the Higgs boson — while other theoreticians produced their own groundbreaking work at the same time. When he won the 2013 Nobel Prize for this work, he shared it with the Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert.
他在完善自己的理論概念的同時，關鍵性地預測了希格斯玻色子，而其他理論家也在同一時間進行了他們自己的開創性工作。當他因這項工作獲得2013年諾貝爾獎時，他與比利時理論物理學家弗朗索瓦•恩格爾特(François Englert)共享了這一榮譽。
The physicist famously went out for lunch on the day of the Nobel announcement to avoid media attention. He was generally a retiring character who once said the exposure from the award ruined his life.
這位物理學家在諾貝爾獎公佈的那天選擇外出喫午餐，以避免媒體的關注。他通常是一個低調的人，曾經說過獲獎帶來的曝光毀了他的生活。
Higgs’s theoretical work after his breakthrough perhaps inevitably failed to touch the earlier heights, as the technicalities of his discipline developed without him. He later spoke about a period of depression when his marriage broke down in the 1970s. He talked, too, about friction in his relationship with his university over his union activities. He thought a main reason Edinburgh retained him was the possibility he would one day win a Nobel Prize.
希格斯在取得重大突破後的理論工作，可能不可避免地無法達到之前的高峯，因爲他的專業領域的技術性發展並未包含他的參與。他後來提到，在20世紀70年代他的婚姻破裂時，經歷了一段抑鬱期。他還談到了他與大學之間因工會活動而產生的摩擦。他認爲愛丁堡大學保留他的一個主要原因是他有可能有一天獲得諾貝爾獎。
That day duly came, at the age of 84 — confirming the importance of his work to our scientific exploration of the universe.
那一天在他84歲時如期而至，進一步證實了他的工作對我們科學探索宇宙的重要性。
It showed that the cosmos was “filled with a weird essence called the Higgs field,” noted Frank Close, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Oxford university and author of a book about Higgs’s life and work.
牛津大學理論物理學榮譽退休教授弗蘭克•克洛斯(Frank Close)指出，這表明宇宙「充滿了一種被稱爲希格斯場的奇特本質」，他也是一本關於希格斯生活和工作的書的作者。
“We need it like fish need water,” Close said of the extraordinary concept that Higgs envisioned. “Without it, nothing we know would exist.”
「我們需要它，就像魚兒需要水一樣，」克洛斯在談到希格斯構想的非凡概念時說。「如果沒有它，我們所知的一切都將不存在。」