God particle genius wins the Nobel prize
(and then promptly disappears into a black hole)
HE solved one of the greatest mysteries in the universe... but last night Peter Higgs was at the centre of one himself.
Professor Higgs, the scientist who first predicted the existence of the ‘ God particle’, was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, but officials admitted they did not know where he was or if he even knew he had won the award.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences could not raise him on the phone before making the announcement and said he had gone ‘into hiding’.
Colleagues said the self-effacing 84-year-old, who spent his career at Edinburgh University, had not been well lately.
However, they thought he had gone hiking in the Highlands to avoid the ‘storm’ of interest.
Alan Walker, a friend and fellow physicist, said: ‘The pressure was so much he decided to go on holiday without a phone to avoid the media storm. He’s not available and good for him.’
In a statement prepared last week, amid anticipation that he would be the 120th Briton to be honoured with a Nobel Prize, Professor Higgs said he was ‘overwhelmed’.
Born in Newcastle in 1929, the son of a BBC sound engineer, Peter Higgs was a gifted pupil at Bristol’s Cotham Grammar where he won many prizes – although none for physics. He chose to study at King’s College London, after rejecting Oxford and Cambridge as the choice of the ‘idle rich’, and gained a firstclass honours degree in 1950.
He was a young lecturer at Edinburgh University in 1964 when he dreamed up the particle that would make him famous. Along with two other groups of scientists who were working independently, he came up with an explanation of how the most basic building blocks of the universe gain mass.
The theory states that the cosmos is pervaded by an invisible field that confers mass on particles as they pass through it. Unlike the other scientists of the time, Professor Higgs also forecast the field was made up of countless tiny particles – Higgs bosons, or God particles.
The theory was not universally accepted and one of his papers was rejected for publication because it was ‘of no obvious relevance to physics’. But by the 1980s, the hunt for the Higgs boson was on in earnest and last year, almost 50 years after Professor Higgs predicted its existence, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider found it.
Professor Higgs shares t he £775,000 prize with Belgian scientist Francois Englert, who with col- league Robert Brout proposed a similar theory around the same time. Dr Brout died in 2011 and, under Nobel rules, cannot be honoured.
Professor Higgs’s son, Jonny, 44, a musician who lives in Edinburgh, said: ‘Dad only found out today – I think he found out from bumping into someone in the street. It’s not for me to say where he is but he will be back on Friday.
‘Tonight he is just letting it all sink in by himself. I’ve spoken to him and he’s very excited. He’s going to fly the family out to Stockholm for the ceremony. I’ll make sure he gets a new suit for it, because he might not otherwise.’