London: Nobel Prize laureate Peter Higgs has revealed that he wasn`t given credit for one of physics` biggest theory, Standard Model, because he went to bed early while the other physicists stayed up and formulated the theory.
The British theoretical physicist, 84, told BBC Radio 4`s `The Life Scientific` that he could have been among Shelley Glashow , Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, who received a Nobel prize in 1979 for their the Standard Model. Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle Higgs Boson, said that he realised that he had missed something as a result of a number of accidental circumstances, first being that when he met Glashow at the first Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics in 1960.
Higgs explained that there was a group of students at the school who stayed up halfway through the night discussing things like weak and electromagnetic interactions. But he wasn`t part of that because he was on the committee and he had work to do, so he didn`t stay up all night, and missed out on learning about Glashow`s theory when he could have, he added.