A Page and a Half
On Tuesday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in Physics.
It will be the first announcement since François Englert died in June, and so the first at which neither laureate of 2013 is alive to be asked what they make of it. Peter Higgs died in April 2024. Robert Brout, who would surely have shared their prize, died in 2011. The idea the three of them published in 1964 has outlived its authors, which is the only test of an idea that matters.
A story now doing the rounds on social media says that Higgs rescued a rejected paper by adding two sentences and so changed physics for ever. It is a good story, and about a third of it is true.
Here is what happened. In the summer of 1964 Higgs, a lecturer in Edinburgh, sent a short paper to Physics Letters, a journal then edited at CERN. It was turned down, reportedly on the ground that it had no obvious relevance to physics. He added a closing passage pointing out that his mechanism implied a new massive particle, and posted the revised version across the Atlantic to Physical Review Letters. It arrived at the end of August and was published in October. It ran to a page and a half.
The referee, whom Higgs later named as Yoichiro Nambu, asked him to take note of a paper that had just appeared in the same journal. It was by Brout and Englert in Brussels, and it had reached the same mechanism first. A third paper, by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, followed within weeks. Six physicists, three groups, a few months. The lone genius of the meme was one of a crowd.
What the meme gets right is the part that should trouble us. The passage Higgs added under rejection is a large part of why the particle carries his name. The editor did not improve the paper by seeing its merit. The editor improved it by missing the point so completely that the author had to spell it out. Peer review worked, in the way a locked door teaches a person to find the window.
It is worth asking whether the same person would now be given the time. Higgs published fewer than ten papers after 1964, and on his way to Stockholm in 2013 he told the Guardian that no university would hire him today, because he would not be thought productive enough.
There is a chapter of this story that the memes leave out and that Israeli readers should know. In 2004 the Wolf Prize in Physics went to Englert, Brout and Higgs. Higgs was named a laureate but would not travel to Jerusalem for the ceremony, a state occasion attended by President Moshe Katsav, because he opposed Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians. The director of the Wolf Foundation later said as much. There is no clear evidence that he backed a wider boycott of Israeli academics, and he should not be enlisted after his death in a cause he never signed.
But the absence is worth sitting with, because of who else was in the story. Englert was born in Brussels in 1932 to a Jewish family and survived the German occupation as a hidden child, moved between orphanages and children’s homes with his identity concealed. From 1984 he held a chair by special appointment at Tel Aviv University. And when the particle was finally found in July 2012, almost forty eight years after the page and a half, the Higgs group on the ATLAS detector was led by Eilam Gross of the Weizmann Institute. Eighteen months later Israel became a full member of CERN, the first from outside Europe.
So the particle named for the man who would not come to Jerusalem was predicted in parallel by a survivor of the Holocaust with a chair in Tel Aviv, and confirmed by a group under an Israeli convener. None of that vindicates any government, and Higgs was entitled to his conscience.
I think he was wrong all the same, and not for reasons of politics. His objection was to a state and its president, not to Israeli physicists, and a prize presented at a state ceremony does blur that line. But a ceremony is also the one occasion on which a laureate stands in a room with the people who read the work, and Israel’s physicists were by then already at work on the detector that would test his. A protest of that kind lands on the audience, not on the government. The physics offers the better image. In the mechanism of 1964 the law stays symmetric while the vacuum settles in one direction. Scientists settle in directions too. The equations do not.
An editor in Geneva could not see the relevance of a page and a half. A department in Edinburgh could not see the productivity of the man who wrote it. A laureate could not see past a president to a hall full of physicists. Each judgement was defensible on the day, and each looks smaller now than it did then. Relevance is the hardest thing to referee, and those closest to the decision are often the worst placed to make it.
In 2004 one place in Jerusalem stood empty. Now all three laureates are gone. On Tuesday a hall in Stockholm filled for other names and other work, some of it turned down somewhere first. The room empties. The page and a half does not.
