Peter Higgs: I never doubted boson's existence Asked if he ever questioned the theory put forward in his 1964 paper, he answered: "No, I didn't really. The Higgs is so crucial for the consistency of the mechanism [through which fundamental particles acquire mass]. I had faith in the theory behind the mechanism, as other features of it were being verified in great detail at successive colliders. It would have been very surprising if the remaining piece of the jigsaw wasn't there. At the Cern lab in Geneva two weeks ago, Prof Higgs choked back tears as researchers revealed findings from the Large Hadron Collider which laid virtually any doubts about his theory to rest. He said: "During the talks I was still distancing myself from it all, but when the seminar ended, it was like being at a football match when the home team wins...It was like being knocked over by a wave." The scale of the discovery was such that Prof Higgs is widely expected to win a Nobel Prize and a knighthood in recognition of his work, and he admitted he expected to suffer from jitters, or "Nobelitis," in October when this year's prize winners are announced. But the Edinburgh-based scientist added that he hoped people would simply refer to the particle as the "H boson" now that it has (in all probability) been found. Prof Higgs has always professed himself uncomfortable about the attachment of his name to the boson, not least because five other scientists published papers on the same mechanism at the same time as his paper. He said: "I can't see how it can continue to be called the Higgs boson. I reckon it will become the H boson. I do sometimes call it the Higgs boson so people know what I'm talking about. I don't call it 'the God particle'. I hope that phrase won't be used as much. I keep telling people that it's someone else's joke, not mine.