On 4 July 2012, one of the longest-running mysteries in physics was finally clarified. The ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced that they had produced and observed the elusive Higgs boson. This unstable elementary particle was theorised back in 1964 by 6 scientists – one of them was the particle’s namesake, Peter Higgs.

In this episode, physicist and former Ri Christmas Lecturer, Frank Close, explores the life of Peter Higgs, a Nobel prize-winning scientist and the only person in history to have an existing single particle named after them.

This talk was recorded from our theatre at the Royal Institution on 7 July 2022.

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Produced by: Sarah Dick

Music by: Joseph Sandy

Thumbnail image credit: Garik Barseghyan via Pixabay