 
I think at first I
should go further back,
because before I comment
on the experimental search,
I should stress that
what was being looked
for was not quite what the
theorists were thinking
of in 1964.
Because when the six of
us in 1964 were doing this
theoretical work, we were still
thinking very much in terms
of applying it to the
broken flavour symmetries
of the strong interactions.
 
Those of us who tried to do
it discovered it didn't work.
And it wasn't until three years
later that Weinberg realised
that everybody had been looking
at the wrong application
and that it should
be, the mechanism,
the Brout-Englert-Higgs
mechanism,
should be applied to electroweak
theory, the Glashow model,
which he did.
And so did Salam.
And furthermore, it still
wasn't clear even in 1967
that you could really calculate
without the theory crushing
with infinities.
And it required the work of
Veltman and then 't Hooft.
't Hooft were
published 1971 to show
that the whole thing was viable.
When that became
viable as a real theory
with real calculations in 1971,
that's when we, well, '71, '72,
there was a sort of
bandwagon effect.
All the theorists who had been
ignoring quantum field theory
climbed back into the quantum
field theory bandwagon.
And it became a
fashionable thing to do.
Before it became of interest
to experimentalists,
we had to have the discovery
of the neutral currents
of the Glashow electroweak
theory, and that was 1973.
And once that had happened,
then experimentalists started
taking the whole thing seriously
too so that by the time
I spent a couple of months
at CERN in the autumn of '76,
people were beginning to
plan the experiments which
would test the
electroweak theory.
And at that stage,
the machine was LEP.
LEP was being planned, the Large
Electron Positron Collider.
A year before I went to CERN,
John Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard,
and Dimitri
Nanopoulos had written
a paper called "The
Phenomenology of the Higgs
Boson" in which they hinted very
gently that experimentalists
ought to be aware of this extra
feature of the electroweak
theory.
There was this leftover
massless spin zero particle.
And at the end they
said, because we aren't
able to tell you on the
basis of present knowledge
very much about it, we have no
way of fixing the parameters.
We don't want to start a
big experimental search,
but we think the people who do
experiments in which it might
have an influence
should look out for it.
Not so much when it began,
so there was the first phase
in which LEP was built, and
as I'm sure you're well aware,
even building LEP was a
long, difficult programme.
I mean, it was thought
up in the early '70s.
And it started up,
when was it, '79?
'89, OK, so it's about
15 years because there
were big problems in
building that sort of machine
at all and at this stage
had also big problems
building detectors.
And I think it's
at this stage that
the experimental collaborations
begin to grow in size, not
to the scale of the
LHC collaborations,
but LEP collaborations were
already substantially up
from the sort of
collaborations which
had discovered the neutral
currents, for example.
 
All the work which later on,
thanks to Simon van der Meer
and Carlo Rubbia, actually
produced the weak bosons.
So the experimental programme
became a very large-scale
effort in many ways.
 
And when it came to the end
of the LEP programme, well,
long before people at CERN and
also across the Atlantic had
been thinking of the next
generation of machines,
it was clear that it was
going to be an even bigger,
longer development to
produce things like the LHC
and the ill-fated SSC in Texas
because of such difficulties
as the need to make
superconducting magnets,
to get the magnetic
field intensities needed
for the higher energies,
and the vast developments
in sophistication of computer
programmes for reconstructing
the collisions and
analysing the data.
And by the time
the LHC was really
ready to go, experimental
physics and particle
physics had grown several
orders of magnitude, I think,
in scale.
And it's been a
really heroic effort
on the part of many
kinds of people,
the builders of the machines,
the developers of the computer
systems, to do it at all.
And I think what has happened
in the last year or two, which
was the first big
success of the LHC
in actually identifying this
particle, which was thought up
in 1964 or earlier, this is a
really heroic effort compared
with the small-scale effort of
the theorists back in the '60s.
 
