The professor who has won acclaim for his contribution to the secular world of science is made a Companion of Honour.

Edinburgh-based Peter Higgs, 83, may have spent most of his career in laboratories but he first hit upon his defining concept of the God particle during a walk in the Cairngorms in 1964 when he started to consider the existence of a particle that gives matter mass.

The particle has been found to form a basic building block of everything in the universe.

He wrote two scientific papers on his theory and was published in the Physical Review Letters journal, sparking a 40-year hunt for the Higgs boson.

In July, the team from the European nuclear research facility at Cern in Geneva announced the detection of a particle that fitted the description. Scientists used the world's biggest atom smashing machine, the £2.6 billion Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to track down the missing particle, and achieved the definitive "five sigma" level of proof, where the likelihood of a fluke is one in a million.