To many people, the sole purpose of the LHC is to find the famous Higgs boson. James Randerson met the self-effacing man behind the legend

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Peter Higgs rarely gives interviews. The 79-year-old might be a shoo-in for a Nobel prize if the LHC finds evidence for the fundamental particle he proposed in 1964 – known as the Higgs boson or, more colourfully, the God Particle – but he is a reluctant rock-star scientist, too self-deprecating to even refer to the particle by name. He prefers to call it the “boson named after me”. Particle physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964 proposed the existence of a fundamental particle – now known as the Higgs boson – that gives all matter its mass. Finding the Higgs boson is probably the only thing many people outside physics know about the impending experiments at Cern. And until recently, the man behind it has been as mysterious as the missing particle. In April, Higgs visited Geneva for a peek at the LHC before it was super-cooled with liquid helium, ready for the near light-speed buzz of the first proton beam around the ring.