http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013 ... competenceThe story of the physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson particle is a charming tale about a quintessentially British national treasure. Ever since Peter Higgs was named as this year's Nobel prize winner, the tale has been endlessly retold, and goes like this.
Higgs struck upon his theory while walking in the Cairngorms one weekend in 1964. An unworldly and donnish academic, he has been cloistered away in an ivory tower since, so immersed in particle physics research that when his first son was born he was miles away in a university library, and so remote from contemporary reality that to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his first computer on his 80th birthday. On the day of the Nobel announcement he wasn't home to take the call, and when a former neighbour stopped to congratulate him in the street, his first response was a puzzled, "What prize?" Embarrassed to be singled out from so many other deserving candidates, Britain's most cherished scientist set off to Stockholm on Thursday to receive his award, blinking in polite bewilderment as his admirers demanded a long-overdue knighthood.
But when we meet this week in London, this sugary tale turns out to be largely untrue. At 84, Higgs is in impressive health, and recounts an altogether different kind of life, in which his political beliefs and trade union activities frequently got in the way of his work, making him so troublesome that he says his university would have sacked him decades ago, were it not for the chance he might one day win the Nobel prize. For more than 20 years Higgs wasn't even on speaking terms with his principal at Edinburgh university. He says he struggled to keep up with developments in particle theory, published so few papers that he became an "embarrassment" to his department, and would never get a job in academia now. Then again, in today's hectic academic world he thinks he would never have had enough the time or space to formulate his groundbreaking theory.
Higgs has no idea how the myth came about of him striding alone across the Cairngorm mountains when inspiration struck. Then he was a young member of Edinburgh university's physics department, regarded by colleagues as "a bit eccentric, maybe cranky" on account of his unfashionable fascination with particle theory and the mechanism by which most building blocks in the universe have mass.
When he identified the crucial particle, his elation was shortlived, for the paper he wrote up in excited haste was rejected. Determined to get published, he added some more paragraphs to "spice it up". This was where he explicitly identified the particle for the first time – and it's a good job he did, because on the day his revised paper was submitted for publication, another appeared in a different journal, proposing a near-identical theory. But Higgs had added enough new material for his paper to be published, and the particle to become known by his name. He shares the Nobel prize with the surviving co-author of the rival paper, and never doubted for a moment that the existence of his particle would one day be proved. At Cern in Switzerland in July last year, it was.
He'd nearly been put off physics when still a schoolboy in Bristol, by the nuclear bombs the allies dropped on Japan. "These were obviously things I didn't want to be involved with." A lifelong Labour supporter, he was active in CND in his youth, only leaving because he got fed up with fellow members "who just didn't draw the distinction between a reactor and a bomb. I thought they were just being misguided by confusing the two."
Higgs met his wife, an American linguist, through CND, and his 1964 paper caused such a stir in the US that an Ivy League career would have been an obvious option – but the couple couldn't stand the country's politics. They spent 1966 at University of North Carolina, deep in Ku Klux Klan country, where anyone who'd pleaded the 5th amendment during the McCarthy trials was banned from speaking on campus. He was shocked, but no more radicalised "than I already was before". He did miss his first son's birth while in the US, but only, it turns out, because his wife went into labour a month early while visiting her parents in Illinois.
Returning to Edinburgh, Higgs soon clashed with the university principal over his handling of the student protests of the decade. "He was a product of Winchester school, and I don't think he understood what they were about at all; he didn't understand the issues, and denounced the student leaders. There were a group of academics who rather dissented from the way he was handling things, and I was one of them." They clashed over the university's shareholdings in South African companies, too, and it was widely assumed that the decision not to grant Higgs a personal chair was his punishment for publicly challenging the principal.
His work for the Association of University Teachers, agitating for greater staff involvement in the running of his department, probably didn't help either, and he's certain he would have been sacked were it not for a rumour in 1980 that he'd been nominated for the Nobel. The faculty dean's view, he later learned, was, "Well, he might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him."
When his marriage broke down in the 1970s, "I got very depressed for years." Not having studied particle physics at PhD level, he was also struggling to keep up with developments in his own field. "I got left behind by all the technical details, and never caught up. So I have," he starts to chuckle, "this kind of underlying incompetence."
But his reluctance to embrace the technological developments taking place in everyday life had nothing to do with incompetence. My dad, I tell him, is of the view that the more gadgets we have, the less we can think, and Higgs smiles and agrees: "I have a bit of that, too." His son gave him a mobile phone two months ago, but he is yet to make a call, and no one outside his family knows the number. "I resent being disturbed in this way. Why should people be able to interrupt me like that?" Because they like to be in touch?
"But I don't want to be in touch," he laughs. "It's an intrusion into my way of life, and certainly on principle I don't feel obliged to accept it." He doesn't own a television, but not from lack of interest in the outside world. "I don't regard television as the outside world," he offers dryly. "I regard it as an artefact." Someone did get him to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, but he "wasn't impressed".
He also had little enthusiasm for the changes that had transformed academia by the time he retired in 1996. "Today, I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." His published papers can be counted on two hands, whereas academics now are expected to churn out several a year, and when I ask if he feels this has come at the cost of space for intellectual thought, he says: "I was certainly uncomfortable with it. 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 wasn't my way of doing things any more. It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1994."
Chuckling, he goes on, "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.'" This is clearly not a source of embarrassment to Higgs, who lets out a mischievous cackle when he adds that a researcher studying Nobel prize winners' publications emailed him recently to say that he'd looked at the papers listed on Higgs' website, but could he please have the full list?
Higgs didn't see the email himself. As emeritus professor, he has an address, but has never sent an email, nor even browsed the internet. The department secretaries used to have to print his emails, and he would reply by letter. These days a former colleague and friend takes care of his inbox, and knows not to bother passing on the vast majority of its contents.
He is always described as unassuming and modest, but, in fact, Higgs can be waspish. When I ask what fiction he reads, he jokes, "Oh – you mean apart from other people's papers?" and says of Brian Cox, "Well, he's obviously a very skilled communicator. But I think he cuts corners." And it transpires that he doesn't feel at all guilty about the fact that three scientists who came up with a very similar particle theory in 1964, but whose paper was published shortly after his, were not awarded the Nobel.
One has since acknowledged that they were simply too late, and Higgs agrees, "I think so, yes." The other two were invited to Cern in July last year when the particle's discovery was announced, and complained about being ignored by the press, but although he does say they "naturally felt a bit left out", he doesn't look too troubled.
On the day of the Nobel prize announcement in October, Higgs wasn't taken by surprise. In fact, he'd planned to head off to the West Highlands to steer clear of the likely commotion, but then his son pointed out that he'd not driven his car since April, so the battery was probably flat. "So I abandoned that plan – but I didn't tell anybody I'd abandoned it, of course." He went for lunch in Leith instead, and when his former neighbour broke the news, he knew exactly what she was talking about. "I was really only joking when I said, 'What award'?" His overwhelming emotion was "mostly relief that the waiting was at an end".
It is true he has never liked the popular nickname for his particle – "the God particle" – but not, as has been reported, because he doesn't want to offend religious sensibilities. If anything, his objection is the opposite. "For a start, I'm not a believer. Some people get confused between the science and the theology. They claim that what happened at Cern proves the existence of God. The church in Spain has also been guilty of using that name as evidence for what they want to prove."
People write to him claiming the God particle was predicted in the Torah, the Qur'an and the Buddhist scriptures, which only makes him regret the nickname more, "Because it reinforces confused thinking in the heads of people who are already thinking in a confused way." He doesn't bother to trying to change their minds. "If they believe that story about creation in seven days," he muses, "are they being intelligent?"
Higgs' admirers are wasting their time by clamouring for a knighthood. He was offered one in 1999, and turned it down. "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." He was later persuaded to accept a Companion of Honour, but only because he was assured – wrongly, as it turned out – that this award was in the gift of the Queen alone. So when people ask what CH after his name stands for, "I say it means I'm an honorary Swiss."
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