And where is last year when we did the Nobel Prize and I had to sit there and say, I have no idea what this was about On this occasion I knew and so I had no one to tell.

Well, it's going to Peter.

Higgs and France were on glow for some wonderful work that they did back in the sixties.

Which has become known is the Higgs mechanism the way in which the fundamental particles in nature acquire a Mass?

Three different groups independently.

We're all working on the same physics they all on the same kind of timescale, came up with, say, essentially the same result on yet they didn't get the prize.

I did watch it, and in fact, it was with with a mixture of happiness on dhe.

To be honest, I was quite sad because it well, first of all, one of the people that should have got it sadly died last year.

Brown to work with on glare and so he couldn't get it on Dhe.

But then there's There were three more who did the work together on.

One of them was my friend.

I've collaborated with Tom Kibble on dhe.

I feel he should have got it.

You know, you have to draw a line somewhere is the way it is.

And at the moment, I think the Nobel Prizes rule is that three is the maximum number that you can actually awarded to, which is, you know, it's a completely arbitrary number.

It could be six.

It could be 10 on DSO.

You know, it's just just a rule that they have.

They have a little write up of, you know, why did they give the prize?

And I looked at it and I thought, Well, that's exactly what they did.

Tom and his collaborators did.

Andi, it seems that they just missed out because of, ah, rule on it.

It doesn't even seem to be a very in writing.

It's just that a rule that they've developed, which is that you don't give it to more than three people but Higgs and on gleefully deserve it.

It's a fantastic piece of theoretical work back in the sixties on dhe.

All credit to them.

I suppose the complication in this on this occasion was that there wasn't a simple third person.

There were three other people that I mean The story of the papers is remarkable were talking back in the 19 sixties, 64 in the summer of 1964 3 groups working basically on the same topic on Dhe.

They all wrote papers within a few months of each other.

I think on glares might have been the first.

And then Higgs came kind of hot on the heels of that on Dhe.

There was definitely then a delay between that and Tom's paper coming out, and in fact, Tom knew about the papers of pigs on Dawn Blair and Brown.

But they were doing their work independently, and they were on, you know, they were basically finishing their work on the equivalent mechanism in those days.

They didn't have the archive.

You couldn't simply submit your paper to the archive and have it read within.

By the next day, you sent it out as a pre print to those people that you thought would be interested.

So Bratton and L.

Glare and Hicks, of course, sent their paper to Tom.

But it got stuck in the London sorting office because there was a postal strike.

So for at least two weeks, it got stuck there and then Tom.

When they eventually delivered all the mail to Imperial College, Tom collected the papers both together on that band.

I presume the read through them and then they because they actually referenced some of this, their work in their own paper, Tom's old paper.

So I think the issue is that probably that it wasn't a single author to third paper.

It was three authors.

And so if you've decided that a rule that says there's only gonna be three people getting it, you can't how do you then give it to three more?

Once I realized they haven't got it, I just texted him and said that I'm very sorry to hear you didn't get.

I think you deserve it, Andi replied.

He replied Almost immediately, Andi just said, Thanks very much.

Such a discard.

You didn't say I'm hard as a of equal magnitude to this fantastic theoretical work.

Easily of equal magnitude must have been the experimental work to actually get the Higgs.

I mean, it's a tour de force.

You've got the you've got the accelerator, people who actually run the L.

A.

C and get the beams so that they're sufficiently high energy and sufficiently stable that you can make use of them.

Then you've got these two huge groups working in CMS and Atlas each have got thousands of people in the collaboration.

I know I'm not suggesting all the thousands of them made a big contribution to the Higgs discovery, but I'm sure hundreds dead on DDE.

What do you do it without?

Without the discovery of these decay channels and without the the painstaking effort that went into actually showing that they that these primary decays were lightly 22 Higgs with when we wouldn't have this discovery on dhe yet You can't it Doesn't it seem to me you could even simply give it to the spokesperson of these experiments because experiments is so long running that they've been through a number of spokespeople.

So which, which spokesperson do you give it to you?

Give it to the spokesperson that was in charge.

You know, when the discovery was made, you give it to the spokes people who came up with the idea of the experiment.

Somehow I think you might have to contemplate giving it to CERN.

Yeah, I mean, they would you do that with a peace prize.

They do that right.

They're actually going to the Red Cross and things like that from time to time.

Actually, it does go to that.

One goes, does Goto organizations and there's a reasonable argument says Well, why don't we do the same thing for science?

Some big prizes of doing that?

I mean, I think w map the big microwave cosmic microwave background experiment.

It doesn't have as many people on innocent, but they got.

Was it the grouper prize that they think they got a big prize anyway, that was shared amongst the the members of the group.

It went to the group.

I think it will be a mistake because actually, at some level, you know the Nobel Prize.

It's like a man of the match award.

It's no, you know, no one really thinks when somebody gets the Man of the Match Award in some sporting event that they were the only person who contributed to the team.

It's just the way it some way of personalizing and highlighting the performance of the team by picking on one person.

And in that sense, the Nobel Price is just doing the same thing.

It's just putting a personal face on a piece of science, which makes it, you know, Maur Maur general interests.

It makes it easier to tell the story, but But I don't think anyone really thinks that Higgs was the only person responsible for the Higgs Bos on just because he's names associated with it.

And he's one of the people who got the Nobel Prize.

I can see the point on the ideal nature of it going to an individual you'd like to think of.

An individual has done this, and but the reality is some of this work really is multi multi person involvement.

You can't I don't think you can pin it down to one person.

And yet it's so important.

These big high energy physics projects do need that kind of level of imports in order to be able to reach the accuracy and the statistical significance that they need to be able to claim the results.

I mean, if you did start giving out Nobel prizes to organizations, there is this real danger.

You know, you get this nice, shiny thing and so supposing it contessa and they get this nice, shiny award and they put it on a shelf somewhere and it would end up being just another corporate excellence award on DDE.

Really?

No one cares about corporate excellence awards.

They want to know about human interest stories.

They want to know about exciting pieces of science and just saying some large organization succeeded in this.

You know, they did.

Then that's part of the story.

But it really shouldn't be the headline item, because that's not going to infuse anyone about science or to the other three.

No, I don't think so, No, because the thing that they've given it for is what they did.

They all did very similar things, and I I mean, maybe I'm not reading it.

The wording subtly enough.

Perhaps there's some very subtle use of the language in there, which means you could actually drop off those three and just use the other two papers.

I I don't think so, So I don't think they can give it that again.

A scientist, we have a responsibility not only to discover stuff, but to tell the world what it is we've discovered.

And the Nobel Prize is a very effective mechanism for getting some of those stories out, and we need to use the most appropriate mechanism for getting those stories out and giving out corporate excellence.

Awards is not the right way to get that story out, telling a story about an individual discovering something, their contribution to this particular subject and putting it in the context.

Then, having established them of saying that that actually there was this all this other stuff going on is the right thing to do.

And then people get this picture of, actually that there is this very large organization and lots of work's gone in.

But they way they were led into that story was through one or two individuals where the individual was part of a team.

Every time I've ever seen one of these Nobel Prize winners talk about their work, they're always the first to give the credit to everybody else.

And so they really are just then, at that point, the spokesman for the science that they've done a spokeswoman for the science that they've done and actually putting that story out there to the world.

And so the fact you know it has to be.

I think it has to be an individual doing it, because if you just gave it to an organization, then you know one of their PR department will be the person to come up before the press on.

That doesn't create the same kind of inspiration that having that you know, sometimes slightly eccentric but usually quite interesting scientists being the person who stands up and does it on the other.

You know the other side today.

So it is a friend and colleague of mine.

Brian Smith, who wanted in astronomy a few years ago, is now an amazingly effective advocate for science in Australia on DSO.

Having won that Nobel Prize, he is now in a position to actually influence politicians to get out there, to get the science message across to a much wider market than you would ever do if you were weren't giving it to some individual on putting, creating a figurehead.

In that sense, you're right.

It's kind of arbitrary who gets to be the figurehead, But nonetheless, I think it's important that we do have those forgets.