Sometimes it is known as the “God particle”, or the holy grail of physics. The Higgs boson is an elusive particle that is believed to give matter its mass, and it has brought scientific celebrity to Professor Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh physicist after whom it is named.

The Large Hadron Collider’s best-known quarry, however, bears a somewhat misleading name. For the idea of a force-carrying particle, or boson, was first proposed by a pair of Belgians. In 1964, when Professor Higgs published his hypothesis, two physicists at the Free University of Brussels reached the same conclusion, using different mathematical tools. Professors François Englert and Robert Brout beat their British counterpart into print, but they remain largely unknown. Professor Higgs has never attempted to deny the Belgians a share of the credit for the theory. He is a self-effacing man who does not court publicity, and he does not even use his own name to describe the particle.

The three, who are almost certain to share a Nobel Prize should the LHC find their boson, are on good terms, though Professor Higgs admits he was apprehensive about meeting the Belgian physicists for the first time. “They had reason to be aggrieved,” he said in April.

Professor Brout is equally magnanimous. “I have no resentment with respect to Higgs,” he said recently. “I find it amazing how perfect a gentleman he is. He has been more than fair. That it is called the Higgs mechanism is not due to him. I admire Peter; he wrote a beautiful paper.”

Times Archive, 1974: Black holes may be explosive

The young Cambridge astronomer Steve Hawking has suggested that these cosmic objects may occasionally destroy themselves in violent explosions

• The holes that riddle the universe

• Hole in space discovered

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