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Peter about Higgs

Contrary to the custom at this conference, I want first of all to disclaim priority for some of the concepts to which my name is commonly attached in the literature. For this exaggerated view of my originality I have to thank the late Ben Lee, who at the 1972 High Energy Physics Conference at Fermilab plastered my name over almost everything concerned with spontaneous synlnetry breaking.
"Higgs fields", for example, are just the scalar fields of a linear sigma model, which was discussed in 1960 by Gell-Mann and Lévy but had been introduced three years earlier by Schwinger. And "the Higgs mechanism" was first described by Philip Anderson: perhaps it should be called "the ABEGHHK'tH ....mechanism" after all the people (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, 't Hooft) who have discovered or rediscovered it! However, I do accept responsibility for the Higgs boson; I believe that I was the first to draw attention to its existence in spontaneously broken gauge theories.
Higgs P. (1993). SBGT and all that, AIP Conference Proceedings, 300 159-163. DOI:

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