Rational Heroes no.9 Tom Kibble: 'It didn't seem all that special at the time'

News item taken from The Observer (P20, The New Review).

Professor Tom Kibble was in Central Hall Westminster in July 2012, when the results from the Large Hadron Collider at Cern were being webcast to audiences around the world. This was the moment when scientists at the Atlas and CMS experiments calmly announced that they had found a new fundamental particle of nature, a candidate for the long-awaited Higgs boson. 'It felt quite surreal, actually,' he says, a year later. 'To find that something we'd done that long ago was again the focus of attention is certainly not a normal experience, even in physics. It was rather peculiar.'

Kibble was one of the scientists who, in 1964, had found a way to explain how fundamental particles get their mass. Working with American colleagues Gerald Guralnik and Carl Richard Hagen at Imperial College London, Kibble proposed the existence of a field that pervaded the universe and interacted with fundamental particles such as bosons, quarks and electrons…The boson found last year was final proof that Kibble, Guralnik and Hagen's mass-giving field was real."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/11/rational-heroes-tom-kibble-higgs-boson