Peter Higgs Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“It's nice to be right sometimes.”

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

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

“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.”

“I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on the social life of the students because a lot of them were commuting from outer London.”

“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.”

“It shouldn't be a Higgs field. If it's anybody's, it should be Goldstone field, I think. When Nambu wrote his short paper in 1960, Jeffrey Goldstone of Cambridge University, who was visiting Cern, heard about it. He then wrote a paper which was conceptually similar to what Nambu had done, but a simpler model.”

“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.”

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

“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.”