Peter Higgs has described his new found fame after receiving the Nobel "a bit of a nuisance". The 84-year-old reclusive physicist has for the first time opened up about his life and revealed that his quest for the God Particle wrecked his marriage in 1970s.
"When my wife and I got married, she thought of me being an easy-going person and I warned her I wasn't. I was easy-going in terms of being adaptable in my social life. But maybe I suffered a personality change in the mid-sixties and became more dedicated to things involving work because it had become successful in some way," he said in an interview to BBC Radio 4. "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," he said. The professor retired in 1996 and became emeritus professor of physics at Edinburgh University.
"If I go to something where there are lots of students, they all want use their mobile phones to take pictures of me," Higgs said. "The discovery of the Higgs boson has led to a disturbance of my lifestyle." Youngsters have shown great interest in Higgs' work lately. A free online study course to be personally taught by Higgs led to 10,000 registrations.
Higgs is very elusive. In November 2013, when he won the Nobel, the prize committee couldn't reach Higgs. The committee said: "We haven't been able to reach professor Higgs. Of all the numbers we tried, he didn't answer any." Higgs said he was informed about having won the Nobel by a former neighbour, the widow of a judge, who got out of her car in Edinburgh as he was returning from lunch and introduced herself. "She congratulated me on the news and I said 'oh, what news?"
Higgs said he was happy and "relieved" to have received the Nobel Prize as "It's been a long time coming"'. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) recently confirmed the existence of the particle, which was first postulated by Higgs in 1964 when he was a young lecturer at Edinburgh. The Higgs boson enables other fundamental particles to acquire their mass.
