To many people, the sole purpose of the LHC is to find the famous Higgs boson. James Randerson met the self-effacing man behind the legend

Peter Higgs rarely gives interviews. The 79-year-old might be a shoo-in for a Nobel prize if the LHC finds evidence for the fundamental particle he proposed in 1964 - known as the Higgs boson or, more colourfully, the God Particle - but he is a reluctant rock-star scientist, too self-deprecating to even refer to the particle by name. He prefers to call it the "boson named after me".

Finding the Higgs boson is probably the only thing many people outside physics know about the impending experiments at Cern. And until recently, the man behind it has been as mysterious as the missing particle.

In April, Higgs visited Geneva for a peek at the LHC before it was super-cooled with liquid helium, ready for the near light-speed buzz of the first proton beam around the ring.

The Higgs boson is the particle that is thought to give everything else in the universe mass, but that bit of theoretical physics is unlikely to be the reason most people have heard of it. Its theistic nickname was coined by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, but Higgs himself is no fan of the label. "I find it embarrassing because, though I'm not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people."

It wasn't even Lederman's choice. "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him," says Higgs.

The University of Edinburgh physicist is careful to acknowledge two other theoreticians whose names, along with Higgs and God, ought also to be attached to the boson. Robert Brout and Franois Englert, at the Free University in Brussels, hit on the same idea at around the same time, but initially Higgs received more credit. "I was a bit apprehensive about meeting these people because they had reason to be aggrieved," he admits, describing a rendezvous at a conference some years after their work was published. Now though, "relations are friendly".

What will he do if data from the LHC does, as most physicists expect, confirm the existence of the Higgs boson? "I shall open a bottle of something," he says, back in coy mode. A bottle of what? "Champagne," he says thoughtfully. "Drinking a bottle of whiskey takes a little more time."