[William] Waldegrave became so interested that in 1993 he challenged the British physicists to help him explain the Higgs boson and make the case for funding the LHC during discussions with other cabinet ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of an upcoming budget. He offered a bottle of vintage champagne as prize for the best effort.

A winning entry by David Miller, […] cleverly used a political analogy to grab Waldegrave’s attention. He imagined the Higgs field as a crowd of political workers at a cocktail party. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher played the part of a massless particle that enters the room and encounters the field of acolytes. She tries to traverse the room, but the occupants want to shake her hand. This interrupts her, creating inertia. Her interactions with the gathering have altered her from a flighty massless particle into a massive lumbering one. In similar fashion, a massless particle gains inertia—mass—because of its interactions with the ubiquitous Higgs field.

[When in 2008, CERN turned on LHC for the first time and media coverage exceeded that of anyone’s expectation] Eurovision told us that at some time in the day there was a total of one billion people watching. It was probably because they thought we were going to blow up the universe.

The costume turned out to be formal morning dress in the mid-nineteenth-century style of Alfred Nobel’s time. As Higgs recalled, “Getting into the shirt alone takes considerable skill. It was almost a problem in topology.”

Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup.