9:00AM, Tue Jul 10, 2012

Wallsend's God Particle Professor Could Be In Line For The Nobel Prize

By Hugh Macknight Location: Newcastle

The retired North Tyneside-born professor who helped discover Dark Matter could be in line for the Nobel Prize.

Professor Peter Higgs, 83, who grew up in Wallsend, gave his name to the Higgs Boson or "God Particle", which scientists believe they have found following experiments at the £2.6billion Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

The retired physicist, came up with the idea that particles – also known as bosons – derive their mass from the speed at which they pass through a field of much smaller particles.

The idea, which came to him in 1964 while walking in the Cairngorms, became one of the main tenets on which quantum physicists built the Standard Model of how the universe works and scientists have spent nearly 50 years hunting down the elusive proof that the Higgs boson exists.

Prof Higgs said it was "very nice to be right".

He added: "At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime because we knew so little at the beginning about where this particle might be in mass, and therefore how high an energy machine would have to go before it could be discovered.

"It's been a very long development over the years of the technology of building machines at higher and higher energy, and the LHC is the one which has been energetic enough and also intense enough in terms of the particle beams to do it.

"It's been a long wait but it might have been even longer, I might not have been still around."

Posting on The Telegraph website, The Unknown Warriors said: "George Stephenson inventor of worlds first steam locomotive and railway, Thomas Addison first diagnosed Addisons disease, Joseph Swan invented incandescent bulb and whose house in Gateshead was the first in the world to be lit by electricity, and bromde paper for photographic prints.

"William Armstrong inventor of hydraulic accumulator and built the first house in the world to be powered by hydro electricity, George Airy Astronomer Royal who measured mean density of the earth, Charles Hutton Royal Society mathematician, Charles Merz invented the electrical grid, Matthew Murray designed first commercially viable steam train, Samuel Tolansky nobel nominated scientist for his work on Apollo 14 and has a moon crater named after him.

"All born in Newcastle and surrounding area

"And now Peter Higgs, born in Wallsend, Newcastle who has solved one of the mysteries of the universe.

"Not bad for a place whose people are often portrayed as thickos in the media."