Peter Higgs: Scotland's Nobel Winner

Everything around us, from the ground we stand on, to the air we

breathe, and the sky above us, is all made of the same fundamental

stuff. How it all stuck together was a mystery, until one man came up

with a theory. Here in Stockholm, tomorrow afternoon, that man will be

awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. It's unquestionably the greatest

honour in his field and marks the culmination of a story that has

lasted half a century. Peter Higgs published a scientific

paper in 1964, it took almost 50 years, and the construction of the

largest and most complex machine in human history to prove the theory he

had come up with while working at Edinburgh University. This is the

story of how a quiet, modest man became a physics superstar and why

he is now here in Stockholm to become Scotland's newest Nobel

Laureate. Earlier this year, I interviewed

Peter Higgs about the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, the

subatomic particle he predicted almost 50 years ago. I asked whether

he paid any attention to the speculation surrounding the

discovery? Do you see yourself as a contender for a Nobel Prize? Well,

yes, obviously. I should say that it... It's not particularly new as

a, well, as a promise or a threat, or however you perceive it,

because... I mean the first outbreak of publicity, at least in the

particle physics community, came with this conference in 1972. An old

friend of mine, one of his colleagues at the time he visited

Edinburgh in 1980 was on the Nobel Committee and revealed that my name

was already on their list then. So, I was made aware of what would...

What might happen if the experimentalists eventually found

the thing. Peter Higgs has won the Nobel Prize for Physics, one of the

dwraet greatest achievements in science. That prediction was proved

right quicker than his one about had been had been. In October, Peter

Higgs and the Belgium professor, Francois Englert were named as this

year's Nobel Laureates for the work they had done separately back in

1964 in the field of particle physics. Peter Higgs doesn't do too

many media interviews, he had to be coaxed into taking part in a press

conference just a few days after the announcement. I wanted to catch up

with the professor to see how he was coping with the worldwide attention

the Nobel announcement had unleashed. I had given my colleagues

the impression I was going off to hide somewhere in the western

highlands. I said that some weeks ago. In the event, I didn't do that.

I just made sure I was out to lunch on Tuesday when the announcement

came. What was your reaction when you learned that you were a Nobel

Laureate? Sort of relief that it was going to be over soon because it has

been coming a long time. Last year, when I think the press office in the

University of Edinburgh seemed to think it was coming that year, they

managed to induce panic in me. I said it would be premature, I think

I was right. I was really prepared for it. It was... I thought it was

bound to happen pretty soon. Few people outside the world of particle

physics knew much about Peter Higgs, that was until last year when this

happened. A discovery by scientists at the CERN laboratory near Geneva

is being ranked alongside those of Newton and Einstein. Scientists say

they have found a particle which is vital to understanding how the

physical fabric of the universe is held together. What exactly is the

Higgs boson and why did it take so long to find it? It is really

simple, well the answers are quite complicated, but the fundamental

questions are straight-forward enough. Think about stuff.

Everything is made of it. It's easy to take it for granted. Why is this

shaped like this? Why does the world, the universe around us, all

cling together and take shape? The matter which makes up us, the

world and everything is made of atoms and Deepwater inside them the

fundamental particles that aren't made up of anything smaller some of

them have mass. Mass make it is possible for those fundamental

particles to bind together to start forming, well, all this stuff. What

exactly does that mean? Time to go back to university. Mass is

eventually a lump of matter, according to Chambers Dictionary

it's a collection of coherent body of madder. What is the difference

between that and weight? Well, this duster weighs something. If I drop

it, gravity will pull it towards the centre of the earth. It if I took

this into the weightlessness of space, it will still have mass. You

would still need energy to push it about. But back at the Big Bang, how

did some fundamental particles acquire that mass and start sticking

together and to the things we see around us? That's what Peter Higgs

set out to solve. Who is he? Peter Higgs was born in 1929, he was a

bookish child, and by the time he reached the end of his secondary

schooling, he was clearly heading towards science. I was going in the

direction of theoretical physics by then, for various reasons,ing one

being my interest in structure of matter at this deeper level than

chemistry provided. And, in terms of my abilities I clearly had some

mathematical skills and it wasn't clear what sort of skills I had. You

know, other kinds of activity in physics. In fact, I was already, I

think, at the age of 18, showing signs of being incompetent in the

lab. Undeterred, Peter studied physics at King's College London

where he was drawn towards the new theories dealing with fundamental

particles. The science journalist Ian Sample has written about Peter

and the history of the Higgs boson. He would stuff up experiments left

right and centre. He was lucky in joining King's College when they

just introduced a theoretical physics module. He was the first one

to take it in his year. Around this time he obviously started to shine

in that area. One of the issues that the course tutors had was, here we

had one guy, on a course, theoretical physics, all the other

students have to do exams when they finish their year, what do we do

about Peter Higgs? We have never set this course before. They scratched

their chins and instead of coming up with a question for him to answer in

the exam, an exam for him to ina, they look in the literature they go

flirting around in the new academic journals. They found a paper that

had come out, Higgs Higgs wouldn't have seen, can't really have known

about, they reword the paper, the question in the paper and they set

it for Peter as a question. Just to see how he will get on. What is

lovely about it, Peter sits the exam and answers the question correctly,

he comes up with an elegant solution than the original author who had

written the paper. His tutor was blown away. That gives you an idea

that Peter was something special, at least when it came to theoretical

physics. In the early 1960s Peter moved to Edinburgh University where

he would spend the rest of his career. It was in Edinburgh that he

wrote two academic papers which would change our understanding of

the universe. A number of theoretical physicists around the

world were trying to explain how some fundamental particles came to

have mass. Peter's papers explained how this could happen. The second

was the more important. The penultimate paragraph that he put in

that paper was the first time anyone mentioned, if these theories are

true, then you gate new particle that weighs something. That is what

becomes known as the Higgs boson. So that second paper is where the idea

of a new particle first appears in print. He is the first one to

suggest it will happen. That paper then goes on to become this

absolutely seminal paper in physics. Of all the physicists working in

this area, only Peter Higgs stated explicitly that there would be a

particle, a boson, that's what makes him important.

Scientists are essentially model makers, they observe, build a

theoretical model and then test it. In particle physics they have built

what is known as the "standard model" it explains the relationship

between the fundamental bits and pieces of "stuff." Every time the

scientists built the model of the fundamental building blocks of

matter, they found there was a problem. There was a bit missing.

How did the particles that had mass, get their mass in the first place?

It was Peter Higgs who came up with the missing piece. His

groundbreaking work described a need gave some particles mass, the way

that gravity gives objects weight and he showed how we could see it.

You think of the Higgs field as this field that pervades the vaccum,

stretches throughout space, throughout everything, throughout

you, throughout me, and it gives mass to the fundamental particles of

nature. Things like electrons and other subatomic particles. The field

is there to give mass to particles and the boson comes with the field.

It tells you the field is there. If the field wasn't there, what would

the union vicious be like -- universe be like? If the Higgs field

was not around, as you say, then the fundamental particles that build up

atoms wouldn't have any mass. That means those particles would be

flying around at the speed of light. If everything is flying around at

the speed of light, you can imagine that the universe, as we see it,

won't be quite as we see it now. You wouldn't have the struck sturs we

see. You will not have galaxies, stars and planets like we know them.

You will not have life like we know, probably not life at all. You can't

form the kind of particles and chemistry we have around today. You

want to imagine how the Higgs field works it might help to have a real

field like this one. If I shine a light across the photons don't get

bogged down, they slip across them. I'm moving slowly in the mud. If I

was playing football the with a ball would get bogged down. That is how

the Higgs field work. The more you are bogged down in it, the more mass

you have. The difference is of course this field is only two

dimensioned, the Higgs field is in every direction across the universe.

That's my go at coming up withen analogy for what, after all, is an

invisible and universal field describable only in very complex

mathematics. Better qualified people have made a better fist of it. The

Royal Society of Edinburgh promotes learning around the world. Its

exhibition includes other analogies. This is the sort of problem that

people like me have to now face, which is to try and explain this to

a general audience. This is one of the way that is it's done. It's like

a famous scientists entering a cocktail party. That's the

mechanism, people cluster around, it increases the mass of the scientists

a people cluster around him. Is that a satisfactory explanation for you?

Well, it's not the way I would do it myself. It's... It's satisfactory to

me, in the sense that I think it not obviously misleading. So I don't

object to this particularly because if I go into a crowded room, I don't

actually slow down gradually, I sort of zig-zag my way through avoiding

people. My speed may not be reduced very much, but the rate at which I

move across the room is reduced by all these people. That's not too bad

as an explanation. Peter Higgs published his work on the boson in

1964. In physics, ideas can take time, and it would be a decade or so

before others began building on Peter's work. What was he doing in

those years? John Jowett was a student of Peters in the 1970s. I

had quite a few courses from him on things like group theory,

electrodynamics, I remember them well. His courses were tough. They

were very good. He had a different slant from most other lecturers. He

went quite fast. It was good stuff. I mean, for the specialists I think

he was already a kind of rock star, if you like, if you want to say

that. People saw this was a very elegant, fundamental mechanism very

important in physics. It was a long way from experimental test. That was

the trouble. For a long time all this physics remained theory. Others

checked the maths of Peter's work and moved it forward. Who could --

how could anyone prove that the Higgs boson, and so the Higgs field,

actually existed? In the mid 1970s, a new breed of experimental

physicists said they could do just that. So began the era of big

physics. When that has happened, we should know whether this that ?400

million gamble established Europe as a clear leader in particle physics

and whether we are closer to finding that theory of everything. It was

like Peter Higgs had written the sheet music but someone had to

whether -- build the piano to play it.

The energy released in these head on collisions would replicate the first

split seconds after the Big Bang. On the biggest and most powerful

collider was built right in the heart of Europe. To see it, you have

to travel to the outskirts of Geneva.

This is CERN, the European European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

It is a vast multinational project where scientists gather to conduct

some of the most complex experiments ever conceived. Everybody has heard

of CERN these days, but it has a history of almost 60 years of

searching for the fundamental building blocks of matter. That

thing over there, for example, it used to be part of an assembly that

collided matter with anti-matter. That is such old hat nowadays now

they have the Large Hadron Collider. Here's what it does. The Large

Hadron Collider is the biggest machine ever. It is 27 kilometres

round and took almost a decade to build. It's 100 meters below ground

and fires particle beams together, each travelling at almost the speed

of light. When they collide head on, huge detectors analyse the results

and look for new fundamental particles in the hunt for the Higgs

boson two detectors had to confirm the results, Atlas andkm. -- CPS. --

CMS. Atlas is the biggest of the four detectors. It's 45 meters long.

25 meters high. So like five storey building. It's the biggest

experiment which is run by an international collaboration made of

3,000 physicists from all over the world. We have a strong team from

Edinburgh University. The funny thing about the Higgs boson, when

you give talks about the Higgs years ago it was a joke. We know

everything about it, except whether or not it exists and what its mass

is. Once you know the mass, you know everything about it. Not knowing

what the mass was it could have been found very early if it were very

light. It wasn't that we didn't look for it, OK. In fact, in the years

proceeding last year, whatever that was, 45 years after the idea came

out, I think for the majority of that time people were looking one

way or another. We were looking, for sure. All through this period we

were looking. We never had, we never had an instrument that would allow

us to look everywhere. We had to look where we could, under the

lampposts that we had, so to speak. The Large Hadron Collider was

switched on in 2008. Last summer rumours started to come out of CERN

that something had been found. CERN were desperately trying to contact

Peter Higgs and his colleague Alan Walker. There were more and more

messages coming saying, a, something interesting will be announced on

July 4th. It came clear as the week went on that more people were coming

to CERN if you like from the people who contributed in this area. It was

only Peter who was not going to be there. It became inevitable when we

got a phone call saying that, "I think Peter should come to CERN" an

email saying, "I think Peter should come to CERN otherwise he might

regret it." I had to rebook our flights. Here at CERN, history was

made in the Large Hadron Collider, 100 meters below my feet. History

was announced here in this auditorium on July 4th 2012. People

weren't sure exactly what was going to be announced. They knew it was

going to be something pretty moment muss when they noticed that Peter

Higgs was sitting just over there. I think we have success today. We have

a discovery, we have discovered a new particle, a boson. Most probably

a Higgs boson. I was caught off guard during the presentation when

people erupted into applause. There was a gasp in the audience. I

remember I then stopped and just said, I thought to myself, I will

linger here for a minute. I said something like, "I was lost here a

second" I meant to say I was lost in the beauty (inaudible). Many people

thought I had spaced out. It was a strong reaction. Peter Higgs was in

tears. I'd never been in a scientific

meeting like that before because people got up and cheered and stamp

and... It was a completely new experience. You must accept they

were cheering you? I didn't accept it was me that they were cheering. I

regarded it as... As cheers for the home team, as at a football match,

the home team were the two experiments, Atlas and CMS with

1,500 members each. That was what it was really about, maybe they were

cheering me too, but that was a minor issue. But while Peter Higgs

is almost painfully modest, his peers recognise his achievements.

Well, Peter Higgs is a genius. It's just, you know, he just... He got

just the right idea. Sometimes you need this kind of revolutionary

ideas. This hint of genius, I will say, the big ingenuity to make a big

step forward. To have done something that impacted so many people, that

has such a big impact worldwide, such a big impact on science. To see

that kind of evolving over decades, but coming to such a nice form of

closure, so to speak, where you have definitive evidence, there is no

question about it, this is now a big part of science. I think that would

have to move anyone. Yet, back home and mulling over his elevation to

the Nobel Laureatship, Peter Higgs remains a deeply modest man. The

award of the Nobel Prize for Physics puts you in a pantheon of people who

inspired you, Nambu, people who inspired the rest of us, like

Einstein. Do you feel comfortable in that company now? Not very, no. I

mean because I think the people that you have mentioned did vastly more

than I ever did. I mean, I'm getting the prize for something which took

me two or three weeks in 1964. It is a very small amount of my life.

Whereas the achievement of people like, well, if you take Einstein,

for example, his achievements were several orders of magnitude greater.

The members of the Nobel Committee very obviously don't agree with

Peter Higgs' modest self-assessment. This is the Royal Swedish Academy of

Sciences. Here we have the old session hall of the Royal Swedish

Academy of Sciences. It's here that the press conference is every year

at the Nobel Prize announcements which is usually in the beginning of

October. Is the desk from which the announcement was made? That is the

exact desk, yes. Where does the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics

put Peter Higgs now? What does it say about him? Oh, it says he is

definitely one of the most important figures in physics and, of course

his discovery, this remarkable discovery, that there should be a

particle, named after him, as it should be, that was a very

interesting theory, had been for very long, it wasn't proven until

last year when one was found in two experiments in CERN. It puts him

alongside people like Einstein, he doesn't accept that, does he? Well,

in some sense he should because what really counts here for the Nobel

Prize is impact of the theory, the idea, the discovery or invention, in

some cases. That it should be the greatest discovery or invention.

This is without doubt a remarkable theoretical discovery from the

1960s. The Nobel Prize is a serious business and guarded passionately,

but it is also celebrated and respected. Curator Gustav Kallstrand

showed me around the noble Museum. When you look at the Noble Award

Ceremony you seep the Nobel Laureates accepting your prize you

feel you are like at wedding. It's a life altering day. It's an important

day of these people's lives. You get the feeling for that. For a man in

his mid 80s it's clearing the culmination of a life's work. But

you are still an Emeritus professor. You fly around the world to give

prizes. Are you going to take it easier? I'm hoping to retire at 85

next year. Flying around the world giving lectures is a recent

phenomenon because of the build-up to the discovery at CERN. For many

years I had a quiet time in retirement I scarcely ever went out

to my old department at King's Buildings. One of the embarrassing

things about being Professor of Emeritus I discovered the email

address in the university, which I really didn't want to have because

the email arrived out at King's Buildings, I wasn't there, I had to

keep it. My family dissuaded me from trying to resign the title of

Professor Emeritus to get rid of it. Before that findal retirement there

is a little business to be attended to. This is Stockholm's Concert

Hall. It's here where Sweden's King Carl Gustaf will make Peter Higgs

this year's Nobel Laureate. It's the greatest honour at the end of a

great career. Peter Higgs retired from teaching almost 20 years ago.

His biggest idea came nearly half a century ago, the work he did then,

the work that was carried forward by scientists at CERN and around the

world continues to inspire. Future generations will take it even

further. Just for a moment, science will pause here, in the stock to

being Concert Hall as Peter Higgs steps onto this stage to rereceive

the highest accolade science can bestow. What what do you think your

thoughts will be at that moment? -- what do you think your thoughts will

be at that moment? That's difficult to predict. I shall probably

remember a Swedish film which I saw back in the 1950s, with I found

rather moving, it was called Wild Strawberries, I think. Anyway, it

Was about a Swedish professor who was travelling I think to the

capital to receive some award and remember things from his youth. I

shall probably feel the same way.