In praise of Peter Higgs

If it had been up to Peter Higgs, the world would have taken no heed of his death on April 8th—nor, for that matter, of the 94 years of life which preceded it. He valued the respect of his colleagues and treasured his occasional “bright ideas” about the way the universe worked. The fact that one of those bright ideas ended up boiled down into an object bearing his name, which became the subject of a world-encompassing multi-billion-dollar “quest”, was a source of some exasperation. The Higgs boson’s discovery, he said, “ruined my life”.