50 Fun Facts About Peter Higgs

When CERN announced his particle, what was Higgs seen doing?

Wiping a tear as the teams finished presenting, he later told reporters, "It's very nice to be right sometimes."

Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with which Belgian physicist?

François Englert collected it without his co-author Robert Brout, who had died in 2011, because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Higgs spent most of his career as a professor at which university?

Edinburgh first charmed him on a student trip in 1949, so he took a lectureship there in 1960 and stayed until he retired in 1996.

Higgs was born in 1929 in which English city?

Newcastle upon Tyne was home only briefly: born in its Elswick district, he left as his father's job moved the family, yet the city gave him its Freedom in 2014.

Higgs's father worked as a sound engineer for which organisation?

The BBC kept his father on the move, so Higgs missed a lot of early schooling and was partly taught at home by his parents.

Higgs spent his teenage years in which city, where he attended Cotham Grammar School?

Bristol was home from 1941 to 1946: he stayed on there with his mother when his father's job moved to Bedford, and the city gave him its Freedom in 2013.

Which Cotham Grammar alumnus, a founder of quantum mechanics, inspired the young Higgs?

Paul Dirac's name on the school honours board kept catching his eye during dull assemblies, and he set out to follow the old boy into mathematics and physics.

Higgs took his first-class physics degree in 1950 from which institution?

King's College London was close at hand: he had moved to the capital at 17 to specialise in maths at City of London School, and he stayed at King's for his MSc and PhD too.

Higgs's 1954 doctorate, begun under the theoretical chemist Charles Coulson, was in which field?

Molecular physics came first: his thesis was on the theory of molecular vibrations, and only afterwards did his interests move to the particles that made his name.

The Higgs boson was the long-missing piece of which theory of nature's particles and forces?

The Standard Model rests on the Higgs field: without it particles would have no mass, and in the Nobel announcement's words, we would not exist.

Higgs reportedly developed his theory after returning from a failed weekend of what in the Highlands?

Camping was rained off, so he went home and wrote instead; he always denied the rival legend that the idea struck him on a walk in the Cairngorms.

A deflated Higgs reportedly told a PhD student in 1964 that he had found something what?

"Totally useless" was his summer's verdict on the idea that would one day bring him a Nobel Prize, written after other physicists had ignored it.

A famous 1993 analogy for the Higgs field pictured which former prime minister gathering hangers-on at a Conservative cocktail party?

Margaret Thatcher played the particle and the clustering guests the field: the bigger the name, the bigger the crowd and the harder it is to get moving, which is mass.

Higgs's second 1964 paper was initially rejected by which journal, edited at CERN?

Physics Letters had printed his first short paper within weeks, then turned the follow-up down; the laboratory that housed its editors would one day find his particle.

How did the editors who rejected Higgs's 1964 paper reportedly describe it?

"Of no obvious relevance to physics" reached him secondhand through a colleague; officially the paper simply did not merit rapid publication, and he admitted to being indignant.

After the rejection, Higgs expanded the paper and sent it to which American journal?

Physical Review Letters accepted the revised version, and the passage he added to win editors over, pointing to a new massive boson, is why the particle carries his name.

Higgs's work built on which Japanese-born laureate's idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking?

Yoichiro Nambu sparked interest in the idea in 1960 and won his own Nobel for it in 2008; he also turned out to be the referee who waved Higgs's paper through.

Higgs's first 1964 paper exploited a loophole in which result?

Goldstone's theorem demanded massless particles that nobody had ever seen; Higgs found the way round it, and half a century on he titled his Nobel lecture "Evading the Goldstone Theorem".

Which particle stays massless because it does not interact with the Higgs field at all?

The photon ignores the field and weighs nothing, which is why electromagnetism has long range, while the W and Z bosons that do feel it are heavy and carry only the short-range weak force.

Besides Higgs, Englert and Brout, which trio wrote the third 1964 paper?

Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble shared the 2010 Sakurai Prize with the other three authors, but a Nobel can honour at most three people, so in 2013 they were left out.

On what date did CERN announce strong indications of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson?

4 July 2012 brought loud applause in the CERN auditorium, where Higgs, aged 83, said it was incredible that it had happened in his lifetime.

Which two LHC experiments found the Higgs boson?

ATLAS and CMS were built to different designs and hunted separately, so that one detector's finding could be checked against the other's.

The Higgs boson's mass is roughly how many gigaelectronvolts?

125 gigaelectronvolts is about 133 times the mass of a proton, heavy enough that no collider before the LHC could pin it down.

What is the spin of the Higgs boson?

Spin 0 was the identity check: no other elementary particle is without spin, and only when the data confirmed it in March 2013 did CERN say a Higgs boson had really been found.

The Higgs boson most often decays into a pair of which quarks?

Bottom quarks are its favourite decay, yet the debris of other collisions hid that signal until 2018, long after rarer but cleaner decays had revealed the particle.

The Higgs field is unusual among fundamental fields because it is of which type?

Scalar fields have a strength at every point but no direction, and because this one stays switched on even in empty space, particles moving through it pick up mass.

The Higgs field's energy curve is nicknamed after which item of clothing?

A sombrero, or Mexican hat: a ball balanced on the crown must roll down into the brim, just as the field settles at a non-zero value everywhere in space.

The Higgs field gives mass to quarks and leptons; what gives most of the mass of protons and neutrons?

The gluons of the strong force bind quarks so fiercely that this energy supplies about 99 percent of a proton's mass; the quark masses the Higgs field provides add only about 1 percent.

The first extensive search for the Higgs was at which CERN machine, which found nothing by 2000?

LEP glimpsed a possible signal in its final months and won a brief reprieve, but it was switched off in November 2000 so that the LHC could take over its tunnel.

The Large Hadron Collider sits in a tunnel of what length under the Franco-Swiss border?

27 km round and about 100 metres underground, the ring was not dug for this machine: it was bored in the 1980s for an earlier collider, and the tunnel was simply reused.

How did Higgs learn he had won the Nobel Prize?

From an ex-neighbour in the street: she pulled over her car to congratulate him after her daughter phoned from London with news he had not yet heard.

Why could the Nobel committee not reach Higgs on the day of the announcement?

He had no mobile phone, and he had slipped out for a quiet lunch to dodge the fuss, so the committee's calls went unanswered.

Higgs turned down which honour in 1999?

A knighthood was offered by Tony Blair in November 1999, and Higgs said no thank you because he did not want any sort of title.

Which famous physicist lost a bet that the Higgs particle would never be found?

Stephen Hawking had wagered that it would never turn up, and on the day CERN announced the discovery he conceded the bet and said Higgs deserved a Nobel Prize.

Higgs joked that the letters CH after his name meant he was an honorary what?

Swiss, because CH is Switzerland's international country code, seen on its web addresses; the letters really mark him as a Companion of Honour.

Higgs resigned from CND when the group extended its campaign beyond weapons to what?

Nuclear power was the sticking point: he felt fellow members could not tell a reactor from a bomb, and he called widening the campaign a really bad mistake.

CERN's director-general summed up the discovery by saying that, as a layman, he thought "we" what?

"Have it" was as far as Rolf Heuer would go, because officially the teams had only observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson.

In which city did Higgs decline to attend the 2004 Wolf Prize ceremony in protest?

Jerusalem hosted the ceremony as a state occasion attended by Israel's president, and Higgs refused to fly in because he opposed the country's actions in Palestine.

Which childhood illness kept Higgs out of school for long spells?

Asthma struck in serious bouts when he was a boy, so part of his early education came from his parents at home.

The slides that announced the Higgs discovery at CERN drew online mockery for using which font?

Comic Sans trended on Twitter beside the particle itself that morning, because physicists had written up their findings in the font everyone loves to hate.

The nickname "God particle" comes from a 1993 book by which Nobel laureate?

Leon Lederman shared the 1988 physics prize for work on neutrinos, and his book title stuck to the particle, much to the embarrassment of Higgs himself.

Lederman reportedly wanted to call his book's subject the what, before his publisher intervened?

Higgs, an atheist, disliked the eventual name and the confused theology it encouraged.

Higgs described which fellow scientist as having a "fundamentalist" attitude toward non-atheists?

Richard Dawkins, he told a Spanish newspaper, was almost a fundamentalist himself of another kind, although Higgs was not a believer either.

Which world's-oldest scientific prize did the Royal Society award Higgs in 2015?

The Copley Medal, first given 170 years before the Nobel Prize, alternates between the physical and the biological sciences, so 2015 was a physicists' year.

The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics is in a building named after which physicist?

James Clerk Maxwell studied at the university but lost its physics chair to his school friend Peter Guthrie Tait, whose name is on the road outside.

CERN, the laboratory that found the Higgs boson, sits on the edge of which city?

Geneva is next door, but the collider's ring crosses into France, so one of the two detectors that found the particle sits under French soil.

Every boson, the Higgs included, is named after a physicist from which country?

India's Satyendra Nath Bose worked out with Einstein the statistics that such particles obey, and so gave his name to every boson, in lower case.

In 1993 Britain's science minister offered which prize for the best one-page explanation of the Higgs boson?

A bottle of champagne, vintage, was William Waldegrave's bait for a plain-English account of what physicists wanted public money to go looking for.

Which American laboratory, home of the Tevatron collider, was CERN's great rival in the hunt for the Higgs?

Fermilab's Tevatron, which found the top quark in 1995, was America's hope in the race, but it shut down in 2011 with the particle still unconfirmed.

Physicists claimed the Higgs discovery at "five sigma", meaning the odds of a fluke were roughly what?

One in 3.5 million was the bar: in December 2011 the same teams saw bumps in their data that fell well short of it, and those could be called only tantalising hints, not a discovery.