EDINBURGH, Scotland — On Oct. 8 last year, when the Nobel Prize in Physics was to be announced, Peter Higgs decided it would be a good day to get out of town.

Unfortunately, his car wasn’t working. He got as far as lunch before a neighbor intercepted him and told him that he had won the prize.

“What prize?” he joked.

It was in 1964 that Dr. Higgs, then a 35-year old assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of a new particle — now known as the Higgs boson, or the “God particle” — that would explain how other particles get mass. Half a century later, on July 4, 2012, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away a tear as he sat in a lecture hall at CERN, the European Organization of Nuclear Research in Geneva, and heard that his particle had finally been found.

Dr. Higgs, now 85, doesn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone. Not that he is uninterested or uninformed about the world around him. Over lunch recently, he and a colleague, Alan Walker, spent half an hour parsing the implications of Scottish independence from Britain, should voters approve it Thursday. Among other things, Dr. Higgs, a longtime supporter of the Labour Party, pointed out, the departure of Scottish members would leave the British Parliament even more conservative than it is now, although he declined to say how he would vote.