Peter Higgs Quotes

#1. 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.

Peter Higgs

#2. After I retired, it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it.

Peter Higgs

#3. 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.

Peter Higgs

#4. I can only speak for particle physics. But it has become obvious that on the experimental side, there has been a huge evolution in the number of people who have to collaborate because of the gigantic size of the instruments used, but also because of the enormous task that is data analysis.

Peter Higgs

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

Peter Higgs

#6. In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking's comments. I said one shouldn't pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.

Peter Higgs

#7. This summer I have discovered something totally useless.

Peter Higgs

#8. 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.'

Peter Higgs

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

Peter Higgs

#10. The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest; I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realise what you're doing is not going to be much good.

Peter Higgs

#11. I was already, I think, at the age of 18, showing signs of being incompetent in the lab.

Peter Higgs

#12. I don't regard television as the outside world. I regard it as an artefact.

Peter Higgs

#13. When my wife and I got married, she thought of me being an easygoing person, and I warned her I wasn't.

Peter Higgs

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

Peter Higgs

#15. The first interview I gave to the press was in 1987 when some people thought a previous machine at Cern, called LEP, might have enough energy to produce the particle.

Peter Higgs

#16. 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.

Peter Higgs

#17. It's nice to be right sometimes.

Peter Higgs

#18. I'm a great admirer of 'The Simpsons.' It's very surprising because it's backed by a right-wing television company in the U.S., and quite often it's poking fun at the people who would be its audience.

Peter Higgs

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

Peter Higgs

#20. 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.

Peter Higgs

#21. Edinburgh is my adopted home. It's a place where I wanted to come and live, and I managed to arrange my life so it happened.

Peter Higgs

#22. 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.

Peter Higgs

#23. When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn't established, and you want to change the paradigm - like it was the case in the 1960s - it's better to work alone.

Peter Higgs

#24. One of the first things I did on arriving at school was to break my left arm falling into a bomb crater.

Peter Higgs

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

Peter Higgs