Peter Higgs

“The Nobel Prize has been a disturbance at the beginning of October for some years. It would be gratifying to win, but it would be quite an ordeal, too, with all the events which go on for two days. I'd think carefully about what I was doing the day it is announced and maybe not be around, or be around, but elsewhere.”

“After I retired, it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it.”

“It's nice to be right sometimes.”

“Nobody else took what I was doing seriously, so nobody would want to work with me. I was thought to be a bit eccentric and maybe cranky.”

“The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest; I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realise what you're doing is not going to be much good.”

“I don't regard television as the outside world. I regard it as an artefact.”

“My inbox and doormat are full with emails and letters from people who want me to endorse their Higgs board game or to inaugurate the walkway of their new office atrium. There's even a microbrewery in Barcelona which wants to know what my favourite beer is so they can brew a similar one in my honour. It is quite mad.”

“If the U.K. were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.”

“I was easygoing in terms of being adaptable in my social life. But maybe I suffered a personality change in the mid-'60s and became more dedicated to things involving work because it had become successful in some way.”

“The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.”

“When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn't established, and you want to change the paradigm - like it was the case in the 1960s - it's better to work alone.”