Our beautiful mind

One of the most important experiments in mankind's history is launched today in Switzerland, but it wouldn't be happening were it not for the work of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, says Brian Morton, who studied under the scientist 30 years ago

TODAY at CERN in Switzerland, what is said to be the largest machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider, will be switched on and – presuming the moment doesn't spark the end of the world as some doom-mongers have forecast it might – the search will begin for a particle that may resolve one of the unsolved questions about the universe: what gives it mass.

The still-hypothetical particle is known as the Higgs boson, but – despite our fascination with every star in the physics firmament from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking – there has been a lack of curiosity about Peter Higgs, inset, the Edinburgh-based scientist who proposed this mysterious entity and process.

As often before, Scotland has played a vital part in cutting-edge scientific research. The story behind today's events in Switzerland dates back to 1964 when, four years after he returned to the University of Edinburgh as lecturer in mathematical physics, Higgs wrote a paper entitled Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.

The paper proposed the existence of a background field through which particles might pass, much as an apple might pass through melted sugar, picking up sticky mass in the process. To atheist Higgs's immense displeasure, it became known as the God particle, although the nickname seems originally to have been Goddamn particle, since it has proved to be so elusive.

Higgs doesn't even much relish having his own name attached to this entity. He is a remarkably modest man, committed to science rather than personal advancement. Now nearly 80, he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of a BBC sound engineer. Ill-health, his father's peripatetic job and the war meant that he was partly schooled at home, an experience he later said had been vital in sharpening his ability to address problems on their own terms rather than relying on textbook solutions or consensus views.

After graduating and taking a doctorate at King's College, London, Higgs came to Edinburgh as a research fellow. He loved the city, which for many young men of his generation embodied an almost continental attitude to culture. In the 1970s, I was fortunate to have informal tutorials with him on a subject that, as an arts undergraduate, the university didn't allow me to study officially. He was a firmly spoken, immensely patient teacher whose explication of difficult principles was always clear and always free of any excess of ego.

Higgs has never shown much appetite for the limelight. The most remarkable thing about him, in a field where disinterested enquiry clashes with some monstrous egos and outsize personalities, is how modest he has remained.

Despite his reclusive lifestyle, he did agree to be interviewed by Stephen Hawking for the Today programme on Radio 4 this week. Asked if he thought success with the LHC might deliver him a Nobel Prize, he said he rather thought it would, but he has a bet on that the Higgs boson won't be found.

Hawking, of course, famously invoked the name of God at the end of A Brief History of Time but did so largely as a rhetorical device. It's not the kind of gesture Higgs has ever indulged himself with. Higgs prefers the human realm, and the workings of science. I don't remember him relying on metaphor, or on the kind of jokey mnemonic illustrations many of his colleagues thought would appeal to undergraduates.

I first met him in the entrance hall of the James Clerk Maxwell Building, whose name clinches a long continuity in Scotland's contribution to physical research. We talked about modern jazz, in which he was interested, perhaps better able than most to find order in the apparent chaos.

It seemed to me that there was a clear connection between his aesthetic grasp, which was subtle, and his ability to look past the surface and find what might be a governing principle. His fundamental position has been that scientific research is always a matter of specific human endeavour, but that its fruits are the property of mankind at large, not just the scientific community. His insistence is that, for all science's ambition to arrive at totalising conclusions and Grand Unified Theory, research is a matter of small intellectual events happening at some distance, one from the other, often inconsistent, sometimes antagonistic, but all part of a vast field of mysterious forces that remains unknowable.

Above all, Higgs has reinforced the notion of science as an elevating adventure. If no-one can see the benefits of the LHC experiments, Higgs would probably argue the experiment itself, which however vast, technical and abstruse is essentially a human matrix, benefits mankind by asking profound questions rather than delivering profitable answers.

Whatever happens today – and the only thing guaranteed is that tomorrow will arrive safely – Scotland can claim a small stake in one of the greatest scientific adventures of modern times. If the Higgs boson is found our pride will be justifiably redoubled.