Peter Higgs

“Edinburgh is my adopted home. It's a place where I wanted to come and live, and I managed to arrange my life so it happened.”

“I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite outcome.”

“That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn't have that, and he said, 'okay, call it the God particle,' and the editor accepted it. I don't think he should've have done, because it's so misleading'.”

“I'm rather cynical about the way the honours system is used, frankly. A whole lot of the honours system is used for political purposes by the government in power.”

“My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn't make it work.”

“I can only speak for particle physics. But it has become obvious that on the experimental side, there has been a huge evolution in the number of people who have to collaborate because of the gigantic size of the instruments used, but also because of the enormous task that is data analysis.”

“I was an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises. A message would go round the department: 'Please give a list of your recent publications.' And I would send back a statement: 'None.'”

“I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on the social life of the students because a lot of them were commuting from outer London.”

“Between 1972 and 1976, I really didn't do much.”

“In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking's comments. I said one shouldn't pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.”

“I was already, I think, at the age of 18, showing signs of being incompetent in the lab.”

“The first interview I gave to the press was in 1987 when some people thought a previous machine at Cern, called LEP, might have enough energy to produce the particle.”

“What kind of pupil was I? Well, I was a swot, but I was allowed to be without any ill effects by my contemporaries because I was excused from games due to my asthma. So being a swot was something to compensate for not being to play football.”

“When my wife and I got married, she thought of me being an easygoing person, and I warned her I wasn't.”

“My first visit to the Large Hadron Collider was in April 2008, before it started up, and CERN had some open days. They were slightly shocked by the end of it because I think they got something like 50,000 visitors.”

“The model I came up with in 1964 is just the invention of a rather strange sort of medium that looks the same in all directions and produces a kind of refraction that is a little bit more complicated than that of light in glass or water.”

“It shouldn't be a Higgs field. If it's anybody's, it should be Goldstone field, I think. When Nambu wrote his short paper in 1960, Jeffrey Goldstone of Cambridge University, who was visiting Cern, heard about it. He then wrote a paper which was conceptually similar to what Nambu had done, but a simpler model.”

“I'm a great admirer of 'The Simpsons.' It's very surprising because it's backed by a right-wing television company in the U.S., and quite often it's poking fun at the people who would be its audience.”

“As a theoretician, I am proud to be part of a counter revolution... discovering that quantum field theory language was not dead and finished but had not really been explored thoroughly enough.”

“One of the first things I did on arriving at school was to break my left arm falling into a bomb crater.”