5 Roxburgh Street, Edinburgh EH8 9TA

Peter Higgs is famous for predicting the existence of a new fundamental subatomic particle, now named in his honour the ‘Higgs boson’, while a Lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics in Edinburgh. Its existence solves the problem of why electrons and quarks have mass. He predicted its existence in 1964 in a paper written in a flat at 5 Roxburgh Street. However, was not until 2012 that it was confirmed that it existed by the Large Hadron Collider, the worlds largest scientific instrument, near Geneva. This discovery earned Higgs the Nobel Prize for Physics.

No public access.

Peter Higgs (1929– ).

Find out more

• University of Edinburgh, School of Physics and Astronomy: Peter Higgs and the Higgs Boson
• Nobelprize.org: Peter Higgs – Facts
• CERN: The Higgs Boson