Nobel Prize winning scientist Professor Peter Higgs has described his new found fame that came with his pioneering work on the God particle as “a bit of a nuisance”.
The 84-year-old physicist, Higgs, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his discovery of the so-called God particle decades earlier.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, Higgs disclosed how his work has influenced his personal life, including the breakdown of his marriage in the 1970s.
Higgs said his new found fame was “a bit of a nuisance sometimes, frankly”, with fans asking him for autographs.
He also explained how he struggled alone with his theories in the 1960s.
“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,” said Higgs.
Higgs came into the limelight after the elusive fundamental particle was found by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The Higgs boson, nicknamed the “God Particle”, provides mass to the most basic building blocks of matter.
The Standard Model theory that combines all the fundamental forces and particles of the universe would have fallen down without the existence of the particle, the report said.
In 1964, Higgs predicted the presence of the particle while working at Edinburgh University.
