News / Obituaries
Cotham-educated Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs dies aged 94
When he was a student at Cotham Grammar School, Peter Higgs was inspired by another former pupil, Paul Dirac, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for combining quantum mechanics with Einstein’s relativity.
Higgs, who lived in Bristol from 1941 to 1946, went on to win the Nobel Prize himself in 2013 after the discovery at the Cern large hadron collider of what was named the Higgs boson in his honour following his ground-breaking theoretical work in the 1960s that predicted the existence of a unique type of fundamental particle.
The eminent physicist received the freedom of the city of Bristol in 2013 and had close links with the University of Bristol, where he was awarded an honorary degree in 1997.
Two monkey sculptures at the top of Cantock Steps are nicknamed Peter and Paul after Cotham and Bristol’s two Nobel Prize winners.
On a visit to Cotham School in 2012, Higgs said that the former grammar school-turned-comprehensive, which is now an academy, helped shape his future career.
“It was only gradually while I was here that I began to see maybe I wasn’t cut out to be an engineer, but something more pure science and the pure science eventually settling down and being physics,” Higgs told the BBC.
Higgs attended what is now Cotham School in the 1940s with Arthur Milton, the last man to play both cricket and football for England.
In a tribute to Higgs, professor Peter Mathieson, principal of the University of Edinburgh where Higgs made his famous discoveries, said: “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.
“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”
Main photo: University of Edinburgh
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