Nobel laureate Higgs discovered and answers questions

After eluding even the Nobel committee on Tuesday, Peter Higgs has broken his silence this morning and spoken about jointly winning this year’s Nobel prize in physics, his history with the subject, and a love of good beer.

When the physics Nobel was announced this week, Higgs was rumoured to be on holiday without access to a phone. It turns out he was having lunch in Edinburgh and only found out he had won later that day.

Where was Higgs when he heard news?
“Curiously enough I heard the news when I was returning from my lunch in Leith later that afternoon,” Higgs told a press conference at the University of Edinburgh. “A car pulled up across the road, a lady in her 60s got out and congratulated me. I said, ‘Oh, what news?’ so she told me.” As for lunch itself, “the liquid side was a rather good draft beer” alongside soup and a main course of sea trout.

How did it feel to win?
“I’m obviously delighted, and rather relieved in a sense that it’s all over because it’s been a long time coming,” said Higgs – in the 1980s a friend told him that he had already been nominated for a potential Nobel. “It seemed to be for many years that the experimental verification might not come in my lifetime, but since the start-up of the LHC it’s been pretty clear that they would get there, and despite some mishaps they did get there.”

How will he celebrate?
“I shall be celebrating with my family with the help of a bottle or two of champagne early this evening, it hasn’t been possible to get us all together before that,” he said, before being handed a bottle of London Pride ale, his beverage of choice on the flight back from Geneva after the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery last year.

Should CERN receive a prize?
“Clearly they should, but I think it’s going to be even more difficult for the Nobel committee to allocate the credit when it comes to an organisation like CERN, more difficult than it was to decide which theorists to award the prize to,” said Higgs, highlighting the other theorists who contributed to the theory of what gives particles their mass.

Given the other theorists involved, should the Higgs boson be renamed?
“The attention has been mostly on this particle because discovering it was really vital to checking that the whole theoretical structure was correct, but really the important breakthrough in 1964 was what is now being called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, which is the way in which mass is generated for the particles which carry the weak force between elementary particles,” he said, but he admitted that getting rid of the name Higgs boson will probably be difficult.

Where did your love of physics originate?
“In school in Bristol I wasn’t very inspired by the physics taught in those days, I found chemistry much more fun and I clearly had some mathematical ability. My interest in chemistry which is one level of the structure of matter, developed further, partly as a result of becoming aware that at my school there had been a rather distinguished former pupil, Paul Dirac, about quarter of century before me. It was probably curiosity about what Dirac had actually done that initiated my interest in the structure of matter at a deeper level in what we now call particle physics.”

What advice would you give to students today?
“I would want to warn students going into theoretical physics that being inspired by great things in the past is not enough, you have to work hard at the techniques involved, in particular mathematical techniques. Even with the advent of our present advanced computers, you can’t do everything without effort or just using computers, you still have to have some basic mathematical skills. Just being inspired by the lure of physics is not enough.”

Now that the Higgs boson has been discovered and the Nobel awarded, what is next for particle physics?
“The machine at Geneva – which was not designed just to discover the Higgs boson, though sometimes you get that impression – is expected to go on and improve our understanding of the links between particle physics and what happened in the early universe“.