When the award was announced, Higgs might not immediately be reached at the time because he was on vacation. Earlier, in 1979, Higgs had missed out on the Nobel Prize through a twist of fate.
The prize then went to physicists Shelley Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for their work on the basis of exactly that standard model.
Higgs might have been on the podium then, had he not gone into hiding at the crucial moment many years earlier, as he stated during an interview many years later.
“One evening, together with a group of students, Glashow stayed up well into the night thinking regarding physics issues. However, I had a lot of bread on the table and went to sleep early.”
“As a result, I missed the opportunity to discover Glashow’s ideas.” It was those ideas that would lead to the Standard Model. But Higgs would ultimately win the Nobel Prize later in his career.
