Elusive

Peter Higgs is the subject of this first full-length biography, which follows how a relatively brief burst of work reshaped modern physics. The story opens on July 4, 2012, when scientists announced the detection of the Higgs boson, the particle that helps explain why other particles have mass and that had resisted discovery for one of the longest-running puzzles in the field. Among the crowd of physicists and reporters that day stood Higgs himself, on the verge of retirement and the only person ever to have a single particle carry his name.

Why did a scientist with so few publications become one of the best-known researchers in the world? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and many others, Close traces how this happened. He shows that rivalry between individuals, institutions and nations shaped Higgs's fame at least as much as the physics he produced.

The book examines both the man and the era in which his ideas took shape, offering an account of how modern particle physics developed.