Frank Close, "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass" (Basic Book, 2022)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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Higgs and the Double Helix
Higgs was a mathematician who uses the tools of mathematics and applies them to the physical world. In his first student project, doing mathematical studies of helical molecules, he wrote a paper with two other people which apparently made quite an impact in that field at that time. He only wrote a dozen papers in his total career, which is very, very small. And they were all, apart from that one, written solely on his own,. So that is what he was doing in the fifties. His heart really was set to become a particle physicist. But er, by 19 60, he managed to change fields effectively. And was offered a lectureship at the university of edinburgh
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