Peter Higgs, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, 1929-2024 - FT中文網
登錄×
電子郵件/用戶名
密碼
記住我
請輸入郵箱和密碼進行綁定操作:
請輸入手機號碼,透過簡訊驗證(目前僅支援中國大陸地區的手機號):
請您閱讀我們的用戶註冊協議私隱權保護政策,點擊下方按鈕即視爲您接受。
FT商學院
Peter Higgs, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, 1929-2024

His pioneering theoretical work helped us understand what made the universe possible

00:00
{"text":[[{"start":10.76,"text":"The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Higgs’s signature achievement was to solve a conundrum about what made the physical universe possible. "},{"start":17.839,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":26.18,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":36.43,"text":"Higgs, who died on Monday aged 94, had an unusual scientific life of three acts. "},{"start":42.259,"text":"The startling insights of his mid-thirties were followed by a lower-key remainder of his career in academia, until his retirement in 1996. "}],[{"start":50.769999999999996,"text":"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. "},{"start":59.773999999999994,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":71.3,"text":"“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. "},{"start":82.37899999999999,"text":"“It is unlike anything else we have seen. ”"}],[{"start":85.64,"text":"Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, and schooled in the West Midlands, Bristol and London. "},{"start":92.657,"text":"In Bristol he attended Cotham Grammar School, where stories of a former pupil named Paul Dirac inspired him. "},{"start":98.649,"text":"Dirac was a founding theoretician of quantum mechanics who had jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"
\"An

Higgs at Edinburgh university in 2013 after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
\"A

Higgs stands in front of a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum in London in 2013

Peter MacDiarmid/Getty Images
"}],[{"start":105.98,"text":"“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. "},{"start":113.297,"text":"“And that led me to read about atomic physics and quantum theory before I was ever taught them. ”"}],[{"start":118.23,"text":"Higgs graduated with a physics PhD from King’s College London and spent most of his academic career at Edinburgh university. "},{"start":125.09700000000001,"text":"At Edinburgh, he turned his mind to a fundamental puzzle. "},{"start":128.427,"text":"He worked in the strange realm of the subatomic, where the classical Newtonian physics of falling apples breaks down. "}],[{"start":135.39000000000001,"text":"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. "},{"start":142.519,"text":"This was a problem: if none of them had mass, they could not combine to create stars, planets or life forms that did. "}],[{"start":150.04000000000002,"text":"The answer, Higgs concluded, lay in a force field that permeated the universe. "},{"start":155.00700000000003,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":163.68,"text":"Higgs later used the simplified analogy of a snowfield — the force field — being traversed by people — other particles — wearing skis, snowshoes and normal boots. "},{"start":173.297,"text":"They move at differing speeds through the area, governed by how they interact with the snow. "}],[{"start":178.36,"text":"One of Higgs’s early papers was rejected by a scientific journal. "},{"start":182.31400000000002,"text":"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”. "}],[{"start":191.93,"text":"He refined his concepts — crucially predicting the Higgs boson — while other theoreticians produced their own groundbreaking work at the same time. "},{"start":199.684,"text":"When he won the 2013 Nobel Prize for this work, he shared it with the Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert. "}],[{"start":207.17000000000002,"text":"The physicist famously went out for lunch on the day of the Nobel announcement to avoid media attention. "},{"start":212.562,"text":"He was generally a retiring character who once said the exposure from the award ruined his life. "}],[{"start":218.48000000000002,"text":"Higgs’s theoretical work after his breakthrough perhaps inevitably failed to touch the earlier heights, as the technicalities of his discipline developed without him. "},{"start":226.609,"text":"He later spoke about a period of depression when his marriage broke down in the 1970s. "},{"start":231.32700000000003,"text":"He talked, too, about friction in his relationship with his university over his union activities. "},{"start":236.919,"text":"He thought a main reason Edinburgh retained him was the possibility he would one day win a Nobel Prize. "}],[{"start":243.23000000000002,"text":"That day duly came, at the age of 84 — confirming the importance of his work to our scientific exploration of the universe. "}],[{"start":250.78000000000003,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":262.47,"text":"“We need it like fish need water,” Close said of the extraordinary concept that Higgs envisioned. "},{"start":267.524,"text":"“Without it, nothing we know would exist. ”"}],[{"start":269.90000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftacademy.cn/album/150244-1712994788.mp3"}
版權聲明:本文版權歸FT中文網所有,未經允許任何單位或個人不得轉載,複製或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵權必究。

「虐待老人」:吉爾•拜登在最糟糕的時機登上時尚雜誌封面

在政治上,一週是很長的時間。在月刊的世界裏,它可能是永恆的。

未來十年的最佳投資組合

投資者應如何調整傳統的60/40投資比例。

極端主義抬頭引發法國穆斯林和猶太選民擔憂

法國是歐洲穆斯林和猶太人口最多的國家。週日選舉中,約50個選區的選民將不得不在國民聯盟黨和不屈法國黨之間做出選擇。

肯亞大規模抗議暴露非洲對IMF感到憤怒

魯託是夾在該多邊貸款機構和憤怒民衆之間最新一位發展中國家的首腦。

生成式AI將焦點轉向合同管理

隨著越來越多人看好利用人工智慧優化合同管理軟體的前景,該領域出現一系列整合併購。

Lex專欄:亞馬遜不應加入Shein和Temu的逐底競賽

這家美國集團在大西洋兩岸都面臨反壟斷訴訟,最好是讓挑戰者在爭奪市場份額的過程中自己熄火。
設置字型大小×
最小
較小
默認
較大
最大
分享×