A renowned figure in modern science, Higgs in 1964 postulated the presence of the eponymous Higgs boson. Its discovery at CERN in 2012 was the crowning achievement of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics– an exceptional theory that describes the visible universe at the most basic level.Alongside Robert Brout and François Englert, and building on the work of a generation of physicists, Higgs postulated the existence of the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) field. The Higgs boson– the observable “excitation” of the BEH field which he was the first to recognize– is linked to some of most essential and interesting exceptional questions in essential physics.