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50 free Peter Higgs trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Peter Higgs came up with the idea that bears his name after a failed camping trip in the Highlands, had the paper rejected by a journal edited at CERN as "of no obvious relevance to physics," and waited 48 years for the same laboratory to find his particle. When the Nobel Prize came in 2013 he had deliberately gone out for the day and heard the news from a former neighbour in the street, because he did not own a mobile phone. This Peter Higgs trivia quiz runs 50 questions across his life and legacy: Newcastle, Bristol and the Cotham Grammar School that also produced Paul Dirac, King's College London, Edinburgh and the hitchhiking trip that made him love it, the three 1964 papers and the six physicists behind them, Physics Letters and Physical Review Letters, ATLAS and CMS on 4 July 2012, François Englert and the Nobel, the knighthood he refused and the Companion of Honour he regretted, CND and Greenpeace, the "God particle" nickname he loathed, and the boson's mass, spin and decays. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who know their Goldstone theorem from their sombrero potential. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Higgs and the Higgs boson, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. If you enjoy this quiz, try our physics and CERN quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The particle Higgs predicted was finally discovered at CERN in which year?
2012
He proposed the mechanism in 1964 and waited 48 years for the discovery.
Q 02Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with which Belgian physicist?
François Englert
Brout, Englert's co-author, had died in 2011; Nobels are not awarded posthumously.
Q 03Higgs spent most of his career as a professor at which university?
Edinburgh
He fell for the city while hitchhiking to the Western Highlands as a student in 1949 and returned as a lecturer in 1960.
Q 04Higgs was born in 1929 in which English city?
Newcastle upon Tyne
He was born in the Elswick district; a brass plaque on the Newcastle Quayside now honours him.
Q 05Higgs's father worked as a sound engineer for which organisation?
The BBC
The job kept the family moving, which along with childhood asthma meant Higgs was partly taught at home.
Q 06Higgs was largely raised in which city, where he attended Cotham Grammar School?
Bristol
He stayed there with his mother when his father relocated to Bedford; the city later gave him its Freedom.
Q 07Which Cotham Grammar alumnus, a founder of quantum mechanics, inspired the young Higgs?
Paul Dirac
The Dirac-Higgs Science Centre in his home city honours both men.
Q 08Higgs took his first-class physics degree in 1950 from which institution?
King's College London
He had moved to the City of London School at 17 to specialise in mathematics.
Q 09Higgs's 1954 doctoral thesis was in which field?
Molecular physics
It was titled Some problems in the theory of molecular vibrations, supervised by Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins.
Q 10Higgs settled in Edinburgh partly because he had enjoyed the city while doing what as a student in 1949?
Hitchhiking to the Highlands
He returned in 1960 as a lecturer at the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics.
Q 11Higgs reportedly developed his theory after returning from a failed weekend of what in the Highlands?
Camping
He insisted there was no "eureka moment"; the idea came together back at his New Town flat.
Q 12In which year did Higgs publish his landmark papers on the mass of gauge bosons?
1964
Englert and Brout published in August, Higgs in October, and a third trio in November.
Q 13How many milestone 1964 papers proposed the mechanism now named after Higgs?
Three
Six authors in total; Higgs alone wrote his, and the journal honoured all three at its 50th anniversary.
Higgs's second 1964 paper was initially rejected by which journal, edited at CERN?
Q 21On what date did CERN announce strong indications of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson?
4 July 2012
Higgs was in the Geneva auditorium and said, "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."
Q 22Which two LHC experiments found the Higgs boson?
ATLAS and CMS
CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid; both saw the particle near 126 GeV.
Q 23The Higgs boson's mass is roughly how many gigaelectronvolts?
125
CMS measured 125.35 GeV in 2022 and ATLAS 125.11 GeV in 2023, about 133 times a proton's mass.
Physics Letters
The editors dismissed it curtly; the same laboratory found his boson 48 years later.
Q 15How did the rejecting editors describe Higgs's 1964 paper?
"Of no obvious relevance to physics"
He added an extra paragraph predicting a massive spin-zero boson and sent it to a leading American journal instead.
Q 16After the rejection, Higgs added a paragraph and sent the paper to which American journal?
Physical Review Letters
The added paragraph is what predicted the new massive spin-zero boson.
Q 17Higgs's work built on which Japanese-born laureate's idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking?
Yoichiro Nambu
Nambu borrowed the idea from superconductivity, but his version wrongly predicted massless particles.
Q 18Higgs's first 1964 paper exploited a loophole in which result?
Goldstone's theorem
Massless Goldstone particles need not appear when a local symmetry is spontaneously broken in a relativistic theory.
Q 19Which physicist had proposed the mechanism in 1962 without the crucial relativistic model?
Philip Anderson
Anderson, a condensed-matter theorist, saw the idea in superconductors first.
Q 20Besides Higgs, Englert and Brout, which trio wrote the third 1964 paper?
Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble
All six authors shared the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize, but a Nobel can go to at most three people.
Q 24What is the spin of the Higgs boson?
Zero
It has even parity and no electric charge, and it is the only particle that stays massive even at very high energies.
Q 25The Higgs boson most often decays into a pair of which quarks?
Bottom
That channel, observed by ATLAS and CMS in 2018, accounts for about 60 percent of decays; top quarks are too heavy to be a product.
Q 26The Higgs field is unusual among fundamental fields because it is of which type?
Scalar
It also has a non-zero average value in vacuum, thanks to its unusual potential.
Q 27The Higgs field's energy curve is nicknamed after which item of clothing?
A sombrero
The dip around the brim means the field settles at a non-zero value everywhere, breaking electroweak symmetry.
Q 28The Higgs field gives mass to quarks and leptons; what gives most of the mass of protons and neutrons?
The gluons of the strong force
The Higgs mechanism accounts for only a tiny portion of a proton's mass; the strong force does the heavy lifting.
Q 29The first extensive search for the Higgs was at which CERN machine, which found nothing by 2000?
LEP
The Large Electron-Positron Collider showed the Higgs had to be heavier than 114.4 GeV; the LHC later filled its tunnel.
Q 30The Large Hadron Collider sits in a tunnel of what length under the Franco-Swiss border?
27 km
The tunnel was originally dug for LEP; the LHC collides protons at up to 7 TeV per beam.