British physicist Peter Higgs was born #OTD in 1929.
In 1964, Higgs proposed a theory explaining how particles acquire mass. This mechanism involves the interaction of particles with a field, now known as the Higgs field. The field has an associated particle (Higgs boson). The search for the Higgs boson became a major focus of particle physics experiments. In 2012, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin.
The Eddington experiment was organised by the astronomers Frank Watson Dyson & Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1919. The observations were of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 and were carried out by two expeditions which aim was to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun.
In 1919 Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin went to Sobral, in Brazil, and measured the amount of deflection of light caused by the gravitational field of the Sun. The results from these observations were crucial in providing confirmation of the General Theory of Relativity, which Albert Einstein had proposed in 1916.
"We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."