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The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Higgs’s signature achievement was to solve a conundrum about what made the physical universe possible. Sixty years on, the pioneering theoretical work he and his peers did is driving ever-deeper investigations into the past and future of the cosmos.
诺贝尔奖(Nobel Prize)得主科学家彼得•希格斯(Peter Higgs)的重大成就在于解决了一个关于物理宇宙存在的谜团。六十年过去了，他和他的同行们所做的开创性理论工作正在推动着对宇宙过去和未来的更深入探索。
Higgs’s ideas have had “a profound impact on our understanding of the universe, of matter and of mass”, said Alan Barr, professor of particle physics at Oxford university.
牛津大学粒子物理学教授艾伦•巴尔(Alan Barr)表示，希格斯的理论“对我们对宇宙、物质和质量的理解产生了深远影响”。
Higgs, who died on Monday aged 94, had an unusual scientific life of three acts. The startling insights of his mid-thirties were followed by a lower-key remainder of his career in academia, until his retirement in 1996.
希格斯于周一去世，享年94岁。他的科学生涯非凡且独特，可以划分为三个阶段。他在三十多岁时的惊人洞见之后，他的学术生涯相对低调，直至1996年退休。
Then, in 2012, came confirmation of the existence of the particle known as the Higgs boson and its associated force field — just as Higgs had predicted. Now Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is considering a €16bn expansion project in part to investigate the properties of this cosmically consequential discovery.
然后，在2012年，被称为希格斯玻色子的粒子及其相关力场的存在得到了证实——正如希格斯所预测的那样。现在，欧洲核子研究组织(Cern)正在考虑一项耗资160亿欧元的扩建项目，部分目的是为了研究这一具有重大宇宙意义的发现的性质。
“The concept of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson is unique in particle physics,” said Mark Thomson, professor of particle physics at Cambridge university and the UK candidate to be Cern’s next director-general. “It is unlike anything else we have seen.”
“希格斯场和希格斯玻色子的概念在粒子物理学中是独一无二的，”剑桥大学粒子物理学教授、欧洲核子研究组织下一任总干事的英国候选人马克•汤姆森(Mark Thomson)说。“这与我们所见过的任何其他东西都不同。”
Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, and schooled in the West Midlands, Bristol and London. In Bristol he attended Cotham Grammar School, where stories of a former pupil named Paul Dirac inspired him. Dirac was a founding theoretician of quantum mechanics who had jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933.
希格斯于1929年出生在纽卡斯尔，曾在西米德兰兹(West Midlands)、布里斯托尔和伦敦接受教育。在布里斯托尔，他就读于科瑟姆文法学校(Cotham Grammar School)，那里一位名叫保罗•狄拉克(Paul Dirac)的前学生的故事给他带来了启发。狄拉克是量子力学的创始理论家，曾于1933年与他人共同获得诺贝尔奖。
Higgs at Edinburgh university in 2013 after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Higgs stands in front of a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum in London in 2013
Peter MacDiarmid/Getty Images“I was curious about what he had done because his name appeared frequently on the roll call of the achievements of former pupils,” Higgs later recalled. “And that led me to read about atomic physics and quantum theory before I was ever taught them.”
“我对他的成就感到好奇，因为他的名字在校友成就名单上频繁出现，”希格斯后来回忆道。“这促使我在还未接受相关教学之前，就开始研读原子物理学和量子理论的相关内容。”
Higgs graduated with a physics PhD from King’s College London and spent most of his academic career at Edinburgh university. At Edinburgh, he turned his mind to a fundamental puzzle. He worked in the strange realm of the subatomic, where the classical Newtonian physics of falling apples breaks down.
希格斯从伦敦国王学院(King’s College London)获得物理学博士学位，并在爱丁堡大学度过了他的大部分学术生涯。在爱丁堡，他将思维投入到一个基本的难题中。他研究的是亚原子这个奇怪的领域，牛顿经典物理学中的苹果落地原理在这里被打破了。
Models of the universe of subatomic particles struggled to account for why some of them must have mass — that is, they are made of matter. This was a problem: if none of them had mass, they could not combine to create stars, planets or life forms that did.
亚原子粒子宇宙模型一直在努力解释为什么其中一些粒子必须具有质量，即它们是由物质构成的。这是一个问题：如果它们都没有质量，那么它们就无法结合起来形成恒星、行星或有质量的生命形式。
The answer, Higgs concluded, lay in a force field that permeated the universe. He thought an as-yet unidentified particle carried a force from this field that interacted with other particles to give them mass: in a sense, it defined them.
希格斯得出的结论是，答案在于一个遍布整个宇宙的力场。他认为，一种尚未被识别的粒子从这个力场中带来一种力量，这种力量与其他粒子相互作用，赋予它们质量：从某种意义上说，这种力量定义了它们。
Higgs later used the simplified analogy of a snowfield — the force field — being traversed by people — other particles — wearing skis, snowshoes and normal boots. They move at differing speeds through the area, governed by how they interact with the snow.
希格斯后来用一个简化的比喻，将力场比作雪地，而其他粒子则像穿着滑雪板、雪鞋和普通靴子的人在雪地上行走。他们在这个区域以不同的速度移动，这取决于他们与雪的互动方式。
One of Higgs’s early papers was rejected by a scientific journal. This perhaps reflected what the researcher saw as a perception among some Edinburgh colleagues that his ideas were, as he said in an interview, “a bit eccentric, maybe cranky”.
希格斯的一篇早期论文被一家科学期刊拒绝了。这可能反映了研究者观察到的一种看法，即他在爱丁堡的一些同事认为他的想法，正如他在一次采访中所说的，“有点古怪，甚至有些怪癖”。
He refined his concepts — crucially predicting the Higgs boson — while other theoreticians produced their own groundbreaking work at the same time. When he won the 2013 Nobel Prize for this work, he shared it with the Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert.
他在完善自己的理论概念的同时，关键性地预测了希格斯玻色子，而其他理论家也在同一时间进行了他们自己的开创性工作。当他因这项工作获得2013年诺贝尔奖时，他与比利时理论物理学家弗朗索瓦•恩格尔特(François Englert)共享了这一荣誉。
The physicist famously went out for lunch on the day of the Nobel announcement to avoid media attention. He was generally a retiring character who once said the exposure from the award ruined his life.
这位物理学家在诺贝尔奖公布的那天选择外出吃午餐，以避免媒体的关注。他通常是一个低调的人，曾经说过获奖带来的曝光毁了他的生活。
Higgs’s theoretical work after his breakthrough perhaps inevitably failed to touch the earlier heights, as the technicalities of his discipline developed without him. He later spoke about a period of depression when his marriage broke down in the 1970s. He talked, too, about friction in his relationship with his university over his union activities. He thought a main reason Edinburgh retained him was the possibility he would one day win a Nobel Prize.
希格斯在取得重大突破后的理论工作，可能不可避免地无法达到之前的高峰，因为他的专业领域的技术性发展并未包含他的参与。他后来提到，在20世纪70年代他的婚姻破裂时，经历了一段抑郁期。他还谈到了他与大学之间因工会活动而产生的摩擦。他认为爱丁堡大学保留他的一个主要原因是他有可能有一天获得诺贝尔奖。
That day duly came, at the age of 84 — confirming the importance of his work to our scientific exploration of the universe.
那一天在他84岁时如期而至，进一步证实了他的工作对我们科学探索宇宙的重要性。
It showed that the cosmos was “filled with a weird essence called the Higgs field,” noted Frank Close, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Oxford university and author of a book about Higgs’s life and work.
牛津大学理论物理学荣誉退休教授弗兰克•克洛斯(Frank Close)指出，这表明宇宙“充满了一种被称为希格斯场的奇特本质”，他也是一本关于希格斯生活和工作的书的作者。
“We need it like fish need water,” Close said of the extraordinary concept that Higgs envisioned. “Without it, nothing we know would exist.”
“我们需要它，就像鱼儿需要水一样，”克洛斯在谈到希格斯构想的非凡概念时说。“如果没有它，我们所知的一切都将不存在。”
