Professor John EllisKing’s alumnus Peter Higgs, who first proposed the ‘Higgs Boson’ particle, joined forces last week with John Ellis, King’s Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics, in a public lecture to celebrate the history of modern physics.
Professor Ellis addressed more than 350 staff, alumni, prospective students and school pupils on the achievements of James Clerk Maxwell and Peter Higgs.
Peter Higgs, who studied physics at King’s from 1947 to 1954, was guest of honour and introduced Professor Ellis’ lecture. Higgs’ theory is currently being tested by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where scientists recently announced they were a step closer to finding the theoretical particle.
James Clerk Maxwell was Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s 150 years ago from 1860 to 1865. During his time here he demonstrated that magnetism, electricity and light were different manifestations of the same fundamental laws, taking a major step towards a theory unifying the forces of nature. He also made a major contribution to the first demonstration of colour photography and the understanding of colour vision.
Following a welcome by Professor Sir Rick Trainor, Principal of King’s, Professor Ellis took the audience on a journey through the history of physics and speculated on what the future for the discipline may hold.
His talk was followed by a question and answer session chaired by Ian Sample, Science Correspondent for The Guardian and author of Massive: The hunt for the God Particle.
For further media information contact Anna Mitchell on 0207 848 3092 or at anna.i.mitchell@kcl.ac.uk.
For more details about King’s see our ‘King’s in Brief’ page.
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