Professor Tony Doyle, Cern associate from Glasgow University.
"Scientists from Glasgow University have been involved in the hunt for the Higgs boson – the "God particle" – for 20 years and I've been fortunate enough to be one of them.
"It has been a long, often painstaking but exciting journey. The day the discovery was announced this July there was an almost rock concert-like atmosphere here at Cern [the European Organisation for Nuclear Research] in Switzerland where I'm based. Not everyone could fit into the main auditorium, so lots of different rooms were being used to show the seminar, with thousands of people packed in. Some of the students queued all night.
"The great thing was to see Peter Higgs and the other key theoreticians involved. For them it must have been incredible, this idea they first thought about in the 1960s finally being discovered. For Peter, it was something he felt he would never see in his lifetime.
"As a child I was fascinated by the Apollo space programme, and for me the Higgs boson is the equivalent of the Apollo mission. The best analogy for the past year leading up to this summer was it being like Apollo 10 – the test run for Apollo 11's successful Moon landing – where we concentrated on developing the technologies required. Then on July 4 that was when the eagle landed. It was an amazing and momentous day.
"But there have been lows too. I can draw comparisons with Apollo 1, which failed and went on fire. When we first started in 2008, within a week the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator used in the search for the Higgs boson, collapsed. We were down for a year to rebuild the machine and that was a huge blow. It was being pushed to the limits of its design and with hindsight that was a mistake.
"These things happen when you are striving to go beyond the grasp of what mankind can do. You sometimes reach too far, but that makes it all the more satisfying in the end when you reach your goal.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article