Lunch, beers and a Nobel surprise in the street

Peter Higgs found he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics when a woman stopped her car in the street to congratulate him.

The retired theoretical physicist had been enjoying lunch at an Edinburgh restaurant with "a rather remarkable range of good beers" when it was announced that he had been awarded the prize.

With no mobile telephone or any way of being contacted, he was unaware he had won until he was on his way back to his home in the city later that afternoon.

"As I was walking, a car pulled up across the road and a lady in her 60s or 70s got out and introduced herself as a former neighbour, a widow of a judge who died recently, and congratulated me on the news," he said yesterday.

"I said, 'What news?' and she told me that her daughter had phoned from London to alert her to the fact that I had got this prize."

The Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm had tried to contact Prof Higgs on Tuesday to tell him he had been awarded the prize.

Instead it had to go ahead with the announcement without being able to tell him and sent him an email to alert him.

Prof Higgs shared the prize with Prof Francois Englert, a Belgian scientist, for their part in proposing a mechanism that explains how particles in the universe have mass.

The discovery of a new particle that Prof Higgs predicted, known now as the Higgs boson, last year ensured that they would win the prize.

Prof Higgs said he thought that the verification of the particle's existence by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, near Geneva, might not occur in time for him to win the prize in his lifetime.

Prof Higgs is notoriously private and has shunned the limelight, preferring to pay tribute to the scientists who had conducted the experiments and other physicists who contributed to the theory with him in 1964.

"I think I greet the future with some foreboding having experienced the wave of attention that followed the announcement in Cern," he said.