As a theoretician, I am proud to be part of a counter revolution... discovering that quantum field theory language was not dead and finished but had not really been explored thoroughly enough.

My first visit to the Large Hadron Collider was in April 2008, before it started up, and CERN had some open days. They were slightly shocked by the end of it because I think they got something like 50,000 visitors.

What kind of pupil was I? Well, I was a swot, but I was allowed to be without any ill effects by my contemporaries because I was excused from games due to my asthma. So being a swot was something to compensate for not being to play football.

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

Between 1972 and 1976, I really didn't do much.

I was easygoing in terms of being adaptable in my social life. But maybe I suffered a personality change in the mid-'60s and became more dedicated to things involving work because it had become successful in some way.

It's nice to be right sometimes.

That name was a kind of joke, and not a very good one. An author, Leon Lederman, wanted to call it ‘that goddamn particle’ because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally. His editor wouldn’t have that, and he said, ‘okay, call it the God particle,’ and the editor accepted it. I don’t think he should’ve have done, because it’s so misleading’.

I was an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises. A message would go round the department: ‘Please give a list of your recent publications.’ And I would send back a statement: ‘None.’

My recollection of the higher school certificate, which involved a practical exam in physics, was being confronted with an experiment involving a sort of barometer arrangement, wondering why I couldn’t make it work.