Back to the future

If the professor is right, and he almost certainly is, then scientists will at last have solved the missing piece in the great invisible jigsaw which holds together the stars, the galaxies and everything in them, including ourselves.

And he will surely become a Nobel Laureate, elevating this grandfather to a pedestal in the pantheon of great physicists alongside Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.

It was in Edinburgh in 1964 that a 34-year-old Higgs concocted a neat and ever so slightly mischievous solution to a riddle which had been perplexing particle physicists for decades.

Something was missing from the universe, as we knew it. That something was mass. Without it, everything from the Horseshoe Nebula to the pears ripening on the Higgs' kitchen table would not exist in the strange and beautiful forms we see them today.

His controversial solution was to propose the existence of a mysterious new particle which became known as the Higgs Boson, also known as the God Particle, a nickname which makes the professor uneasy.

His idea, greeted with amusement, has since gathered so much momentum that today, in a 27km tunnel hundreds of metres below ground near Geneva, hundreds of scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, are busily slotting into place the final pieces of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's largest science experiment.

"If the Higgs Boson exists, they should find it with the LHC," he says, gazing out from his apartment in Edinburgh. When it is finally switched on this summer, after 15 years of planning and delicate assembly, beams of subatomic particles will begin hurtling round the 27 kilometres of tunnels, passing through the seven-storey Atlas detector at such enormous speed that, by the time you count the number of zeroes, they have done another thousand laps, or more.

Inside Atlas - the biggest of four detectors - the particles smash together, recreating the moment milliseconds after the Big Bang when the universe took shape.

This will be his first visit to the LHC, bringing with it the kind of spotlight and fanfare which makes him cringe. "I'm getting a bit nervous," he confides.

For a man on the verge of a Nobel Prize, Mr Higgs is rather understated and publicity-shy. He is every bit as elusive as the particle which bears his name. "I get very uneasy when people try to attach too much importance to me," he says. "All I was doing was bringing together things we already knew about the universe."

His modesty betrays the truth that both his ideas and approach to resolving the inconsistencies in the standard model of matter were regarded as obscure and misguided. This was 1964 and his approach to quantum field electrodynamics was "deeply unfashionable".

"A lot of people thought I was mad to be even thinking about it," he says, allowing himself a smile. "They were known as axiomatic theorists. They thought they had it all sown up."

When he sent his first proof to none other than Cern in 1964 the paper was returned, rejected with a polite letter explaining it was essentially, irrelevant. Unperturbed, he crafted a second, more-detailed paper in 1966 - sufficiently rigorous to rouse the attention of a Mr Freeman Dyson, at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.

Mr Higgs made the journey and delivered a presentation in which, to his relief, none of the illuminati assembled could find any fault.

"I was told afterwards that they had all been looking forward to tearing my theory to pieces."

The search for the "God particle" would go on to captivate the world's great scientists, science fiction writers and briefly, Ronald Reagan, who flirted with funding a particle accelerator. "I think he thought we were building a ray gun," he chuckles.

There have been hints of success. The previous accelerator at Cern - LEP - came up tantalisingly short, seeing "glimmers" and "hints" of "something which might have been in the range of the Higgs".

There have been so many near misses, that Stephen Hawking has placed a wager of £100 that the Higgs Boson will never be found.

"I'm afraid the calculation which he bases his belief on is, from a particle physicists point of view, just not a very good one," says Mr Higgs.

He is confident in the robustness of his theory. But how soon then, will Professor Hawking have to pay out on his wager?

"Let's put it this way," he grins, "there's a conference next year in Glasgow to discuss the first results from the LHC, and I've been invited - dead or alive."

A genius with one big idea'

• Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on May 29, 1929.

• His father was a sound engineer with the BBC, and as a result of childhood asthma, together with the family moving around because of his father's job, and later the Second World War, Higgs missed some early schooling and was taught at home.

• He was raised in Bristol where he attended Cotham Grammar School, where he was inspired by the work of one of the school's alumni, Paul Dirac, who founded the field of quantum mechanics.

• At the age of 17, Higgs moved to City of London School, where he specialised in mathematics, then to King's College London, and in his 30s, to Edinburgh University.

• It was at Edinburgh that he first became interested in mass, while studying what are known as "broken symmetries". He conceived of what is now known as the "Higgs mechanism" one weekend in 1964, though not as has been widely reported, while out walking the Cairngorms.

• After the summer, a student returning to his lab heard Higgs declare that he had his "one big idea".

• A similar mechanism was proposed independently in 1964 by Robert Brout and Francois Englert, but they failed to publish as quickly as Higgs.

• The terms Higgs Boson and Higgs Field were coined several years later by another physicist.

• Higgs has received a number of awards in connection with his work and research, including the Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics from the Institute of Physics and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics.

• He is emeritus professor at Edinburgh University and a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.