Short but sweet – Higgs (1964)
In the light of all this Malarkey about the (claimed) discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider, I thought you might be interested to see the original paper by Higgs (1964) in its entirety. As you can see, it’s surprisingly small. The paper, I mean, not the boson…
p.s. The paper is freely available to download from the American Physical Society website; no breach of copyright is intended.
p.p.s. The manuscript was received by Physical Review Letters on 31st August 1964, i.e. 48 years ago today.
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In the Dark 
August 31, 2012 at 3:49 pm
Reference 1 is a bit cheeky!
August 31, 2012 at 4:33 pm
He was gambling on the assumption that he would publish at least one other paper in his lifetime!
August 31, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Actually Reference 1 had already been accepted by Physics Letters, so it wasn’t just wishful thinking. That paper said “there’s a good reason to think Goldstone’s theorem can be evaded.” This paper, giving an explicit model in which Goldstone’s theorem actually is evaded, was then rejected by the same journal, so Higgs added more content and submitted to PRL. Among the new content was mention of a certain boson.
August 31, 2012 at 6:02 pm
I always assumed this paper was rejected by Physics Letters because it was too short.
August 31, 2012 at 6:17 pm
About the same length as Crick and Watson’s DNA double-helix paper in Nature. Plenty of people win Nobel Prizes, but not many have the joy of knowing in real time that they are writing such a paper.
August 31, 2012 at 11:37 pm
[…] the In the Dark blog, we are reminded that today (Aug. 31) is the 48th anniversary of the seminal paper in Physical […]
September 1, 2012 at 3:35 pm
Read ether=gravity=dark energy theory of gravitoethertons in the light of balloon inside balloon theory of matter and antimatter universe on opposite entropy path producing gravitoethertons at common boundary by annihilation and injected into our universe as dark energy causing all laws and gravity etc etc. And it appears that new particle is graviton and the other particle for electromagnetism is to be discovered at higher energy collision. DURGAS DATTA also predicted that there is no weak or strong force as per his new model of atom –again positive charge balloon in negative charged balloon with neutrons at common center etc etc. Probably Bohrs model is defective . If we consider gravitoethertons are mono magnetic coupling then we can also explain–Avogadros law, Periodic table, Galileos equal fall experiment from Pisa–the big question why and even dark matter by modifying Newton etc etc –very much out of standard model –predicting NEW PHYSICS.
September 12, 2012 at 5:47 pm
[…] Boson. Higgs’ paper was eventually published by a different journal, Physical Review Letters. You can read it online. (Many thanks to Rachel Courtland for the history, and to Jennifer Ouellette for the Higgs paper […]
March 5, 2015 at 12:38 pm
[…] the In the Dark blog, we are reminded that today (Aug. 31) is the 48th anniversary of the seminal paper inPhysical […]