You’ve won the Nobel Prize... how neighbour broke news to physics genius
THE scientist who first suggested the ‘God’ particle’s existence was lunching on soup, sea bass and beer when news of his accolade broke around the world.
Professor Peter Higgs finished his meal and headed for his Edinburgh flat, unaware that he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics.
It was only when a former neighbour’s car skidded to a halt beside him that he learned the astounding news.
She succeeded where the Royal Swedish Academy failed – it had been trying for hours to contact the shy and retiring genius by telephone.
Last year, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider indicated that Professor Higgs’s 50-year-old theory on the existence of the God particle was actually correct.
He had postulated that the particle, which became known as the Higgs Boson in his honour, gave the building blocks of the universe mass.
Addressing a press conference at Edinburgh University yesterday, the academic told how he had found out about his Nobel Prize, which was bestowed on Tuesday.
‘I was in Leith, having a nice lunch of a soup, sea bass and draught beer,’ he said. ‘I was returning from
‘I was having a nice lunch’
lunch, along Heriot Row when a car pulled up and a lady jumped out and introduced herself as a former neighbour and the widow of a judge who died recently.
‘She congratulated me on “the news”. I said: “Oh, what news?”
‘Her daughter had phoned her from London to alert her to the fact that I had got the prize.
‘Obviously, I heard more about it when I got home and started readi ng the messages which had mounted up, somewhat.’
Dressed in blue open neck shirt and black slacks the 84-year- old emeritus professor of physics at Edinburgh University, declared himself delighted by the award, which he shares with Belgian colleague Francois Englert.
The genius, who usually works in solitude with a ‘paper and pencil’ and does not own a TV, mobile phone or computer, added: ‘I am delighted and relieved it’s all over. It’s been a long time coming.
‘As long ago as 1980, an old friend, who happened to work in Sweden, told me that I’d been nominated. So I was already alerted to the possibility.
‘But I always wondered if the experimental verification of the Higgs Boson would come in my lifetime.’
Professor Higgs, originally from Tyneside, was a young lecturer and researcher in theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 when he came up with the notion of the Higgs Boson.
The keen hillwalker was walking in the Cairngorms when he arrived at the conclusion that there must be an as yet unknown particle which created a ‘field’ giving mass to the smallest of matter – the first building block of everything.
Professor Higgs published two papers but, at first, his theory was scorned. By the 1970s, however, a new generation of scientists were searching for the Holy Grail of physics. It was not until 30 years later that the search began in earnest, with the establishment of CERN and the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest ‘atom smasher’, housed in an 18-mile-long tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border. Nearly two years ago, scientists there spotted what they thought was the subatomic particle which Professor Higgs predicted.
It was identified among trillions of sub- atomic explosions -a glimpse of one of the universe’s great secrets.
Within hours, Professor Higgs received a call in Edinburgh and was told: ‘They may have found the God particle’.
It would, however, be another year before ‘experimental verification’ confirmed its existence.
Although he has l ong been regarded as a superstar among the scientific community, Professor Higgs will now have to cope with more widespread fame.
He said: ‘I face the immediate future with foreboding. This will trigger a new order of magnitude of attention. I will be having difficulty for the next few months to have any of my life to myself.’
And asked where he goes from here, the scientist revealed: ‘To celebrate. I shall be seeing the family and opening a bottle or two of Champagne.’