Quantum leap An excellent guide to the man and the science behind the boson particle – and how its discovery ‘ruined’ his life

Peter Higgs was in Sicily, enjoying lunch in a restaurant when he learned that the subatomic particle named after him had finally been found. Outside, the stone streets of Erice burned in the midday sun; inside, a Dutch film crew was making a documentary about the boson he had described in a two-page research paper nearly half a century earlier.

With Higgs was Alan Walker, another physicist who, since retirement, had served as a kind of personal assistant. Walker stepped away to take a call. John Ellis, a senior theorist at Cern in Switzerland, home