Father of 'the God particle' Peter Higgs says fame is a bit of a nuisance

Physicist, who predicted existence of Higgs boson, says he struggled to understand significance of his own theories
Peter Higgs responds to Nobel award
Physicist Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the so-called God particle. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Nobel prize-winning scientist Prof Peter Higgs, says he finds his new-found fame "a bit of a nuisance".

The 84-year-old scientist was thrust into the limelight after the elusive fundamental particle that bears his name was found by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the huge atom-smashing machine built to probe the origins of the universe.

However, after struggling with his theories in the 1960s without much support, the subsequent transition to celebrity has not been a comfortable one for him.

"Nobody else took what I was doing seriously, so nobody would want to work with me," he said in an interview on The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4. "I was thought to be a bit eccentric and maybe cranky."

Asked how he feels about being stopped in the street now and asked for his autograph, he said: "It's a bit of a nuisance sometimes, frankly."

The Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, provides mass to the most basic building blocks of matter. Without it, the Standard Model theory that combines all the fundamental forces and particles of the universe would have fallen down.

Higgs predicted the existence of the particle while working at Edinburgh University in 1964. But until its momentous discovery at the LHC near Geneva in 2012, it had proved impossible to track down.

Higgs said he initially failed to appreciate the significance of his theory.

"It seemed to me that this was an important result which I had got, but of course it wasn't clear at the time how it would be applied in particle physics, and those of us who did the work in 64 were looking in the wrong place for the application," he confesses.

Eventually it was left to others, led by Steven Weinberg, to build on Higgs' work and put together the Standard Model.

Higgs regrets missing an opportunity when he met American Nobel Laureate Professor Sheldon Glashow at the first Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics in 1960.

"There were a group of students at the summer school who stayed up halfway through the night discussing things like weak and electromagnetic interactions, but I wasn't part of that – I was on the committee, and I had work to do, so I didn't stay up all night, so I didn't learn about Glashow's theory when I could have."

In 1979, Glashow was awarded the physics Nobel Prize for work on electroweak interactions, which made a major contribution to the Standard Model.

Higgs also talks frankly about his marriage to Jody Williamson, an American linguist in 1972. "When my wife and I got married, she thought of me being an easygoing person and I warned her I wasn't.

"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."

After the publication of the Standard Model, Higgs admits he was left behind as the field continued to develop.

He shot from obscurity to fame after the Higgs boson discovery and last year shared the Nobel prize with Belgian François Englert.

Higgs added that he believes a third scientist should have shared the Nobel prize, theoretical physicist Prof Tom Kibble, from Imperial College London, who also worked on the Higgs boson.