Physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson that scientists believe they have found tells of vindication after 50 years

The physicist who gave his name to the elusive "God particle" that scientists believe they have found said on Friday it was "very nice to be right".

Teams at the Large Hadron Collider, the £2.6bn atom-smasher near Geneva, Switzerland, said on Tuesday that they had found a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

The discovery was described as "momentous" and "a milestone". But the results are preliminary and more work is needed before scientists can be sure about what they have captured.

Professor Peter Higgs, 83, the retired British physicist from the Edinburgh University, hit on the concept of the eponymous mechanism in 1964 while walking in the Cairngorms.

He could now be eligible for a Nobel prize.

Prof Higgs gave his reaction to the discovery in a press conference at the university on Friday. Asked whether he felt a sense of vindication, he said: "It's very nice to be right sometimes."

He added: "At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime because we knew so little at the beginning about where this particle might be in mass, and therefore how high an energy machine would have to go before it could be discovered.

"It's been a very long development over the years of the technology of building machines at higher and higher energy, and the [Large Hadron Collider] is the one which has been energetic enough and also intense enough in terms of the particle beams to do it.

"It's been a long wait but it might have been even longer, I might not have been still around."

The press conference followed Edinburgh University's announcement that a new centre named after Prof Higgs is to support future research in theoretical physics.

The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics will bring together scientists from around the world to seek an even deeper understanding of how the universe works.

The university has committed an initial sum of £750,000 for new academic staff, PhD studentships and a programme of international visitors and workshops at the centre, which will be based within refurbished space at the James Clerk Maxwell Building on the King's Buildings campus.

The university will also establish a chair in the name of Peter Higgs.

Professor Richard Kenway, of the university, said: "Discovery of the Higgs boson completes our picture of the known elementary particles, but these make up only 4% of the universe.

"It demonstrates the power of theoretical physics to explain nature, even though it took over 50 years for the experimental confirmation.

"So, we are confident that the work of the Higgs Centre can guide our search for what the rest of the universe is made of."

The Higgs boson gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together. Observations so far show the discovery looks and acts like the long-sought particle that has eluded scientists for 50 years.

Finding the Higgs boson is vital to the Standard Model, the theory that describes the web of particles, forces and interactions which make up the universe.

Without the Higgs boson to give matter mass and weight, there could be no Standard Model universe. If it was proven not to exist, scientists would have had to rip up the theory and go back to the drawing board.

Rolf Heuer, director general of the Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research which identified the Higgs boson, said: "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature."

Asked whether he had any doubts in the past 50 years that his theory would be proved right, Prof Higgs said: "The existence of this particle is so crucial to understanding how the rest of the theory works as well as it already does in terms of previous experimental verifications of the structure that it was very hard for me to understand how it couldn't be there.

"If it was proved to be non-existent, I would say I no longer understand the whole area of theoretical and particle physics that I thought I did understand in recent years and which were, when I was an undergraduate, a complete mystery."