The Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist Professor Peter Higgs, whose prediction of the Higgs boson helped revolutionise understanding of the universe, has died aged 94.
Higgs, who died peacefully at home on Monday, saw the groundbreaking theoretical work he and others did in the 1960s triumphantly confirmed by experiments at the Cern particle accelerator almost half a century later.
The detection of the Higgs boson in 2012 at Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, completed the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. It confirmed the existence of a fundamental field that, as Higgs had postulated, filled the universe and gave mass to the stars, planets and life within.