Peter Higgs

The sequence

1 documented failure, shown with the successes in between. Every entry carries its own source — the wins are part of the record, and leaving them out is how these stories get distorted.

1. 1964

   A first paper shows that a spontaneously broken local symmetry need not produce the massless particles everyone expected.

   noteBrief History of the Higgs Mechanism (University of Edinburgh)

2. 1964

   The second paper, describing what became the Higgs model, is rejected by Physics Letters.

   failureBrief History of the Higgs Mechanism (University of Edinburgh)

3. 1964

   Rewriting it to answer the rejection, he adds the thing the first version lacked: the prediction of a massive boson.

   noteThe boson that physics almost rejected (Symmetry Magazine)

4. 1964

   The revised paper is accepted by Physical Review Letters.

   noteBrief History of the Higgs Mechanism (University of Edinburgh)

5. 1964-1971

   Almost nobody takes any notice of it, or of the parallel papers by Englert and Brout and by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, until 't Hooft and Veltman show that theories of this kind are renormalisable.

   noteA Historical Profile of the Higgs Boson (Ellis, Gaillard and Nanopoulos, arXiv, 2012)

6. 2012

   Forty-eight years later, ATLAS and CMS at CERN find the boson. Higgs: it is very nice to be right sometimes.

   successThe boson that physics almost rejected (Symmetry Magazine)