Peter Higgs Quotes

Nobody else took what I was doing seriously, so nobody would want to work with me. I was thought to be a bit eccentric and maybe cranky.

I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge.

When you look at a vacuum in a quantum theory of fields, it isn't exactly nothing.

This summer I have discovered something totally useless.

There is a sort of mythology that grows up about what happened, which is different from what really did happen.

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.'

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn't have that, and he said 'okay, call it the God particle', and the editor accepted it. I don't think he should've have done, because it's so misleading.

The way that the background fields generates mass is rather like the way in which when light passes through a transparent medium like glass or water, it gets slowed down. It no longer travels with the fundamental velocity of light c. And that's the way to think of the generation of mass.

Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.

The model I came up with in 1964 is just the invention of a rather strange sort of medium that looks the same in all directions and produces a kind of refraction that is a little bit more complicated than that of light in glass or water.

My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn't make it work.

If the U.K. were threatening to withdraw from Europe, I would certainly want Scotland to be out of that.

I would send back a statement: ‘None.’