Going to bed early cost Peter Higgs credit for big physics theory

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.