Eighty-four year old scientist Peter Higgs has won the Nobel Prize in physics, but he learnt of the same via a neighbor.
The shy physicist from Britain won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday, October 8, along with Belgian colleague Francois Englert for helping to explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.
Higgs, however, learned of his award in physics the old-fashioned way: Word on the street. Apparently, a neighbor who was aware of the news congratulated Higgs who was returning from Lunch in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"She congratulated me on the news and I said 'oh, what news?" said Higgs to reporters on Friday, October 11. "I heard more about it obviously when I got home and started reading the messages."
Traditionally, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences calls Nobel laureates to inform them about the prize, but could not get through to Higgs as the retired professor does not own a mobile phone or a computer.
Working independently since the 1960's, Higgs and Englert came up with a theory that pivoted around the existence of a subatomic particle, which came to be known as the Higgs boson or the "God particle." The theory is based on how blocks of the universe clumped together and gained mass to form matter, what we see around us today.
Both Higgs and Englert were widely tipped to win the Nobel Prize in physics for their contribution.
"In CERN here, most all of the physicists I know, about 95 percent, expected those two would win it. The question was if there would be a third and who it would be," said Joe Incandela, a professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara and leader of the CMS experiment, one of the two groups that discovered the Higgs particle.
Higgs will share the $1.2 million prize with Englert. The physicist also acknowledged the contribution of other researchers and paid tribute to - Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble - who also published a paper on the subject a few weeks after Higgs.
