Inspired by the example of Peter Higgs, the recently deceased physicist who won the Nobel Prize for proposing the existence of the Higgs Boson, a bus driver from Ipswich has announced that he too has discovered an elemental particle.
Colin Sawdust said that he became interested in Higgs when reading about him in a copy of the Readers Digest someone left on his bus. ”At first, I thought it was very suspicious that the particle he discovered had the same name as him. Then I realised that was incredibly stupid of me.
“But as I read on, I became fascinated by the fact that they didn’t even prove the Higgs Boson existed until 2012, by which time he’d already been given the Nobel Prize just for suggesting it. ”With this in mind, I’d like to propose the existence of the Sawdust Boson. But I should warn you, it’s really small. I mean, if you thought the Higgs Boson was small, this is really tiny even compared to that. So don’t worry if you don’t manage to find any evidence of it for the next few decades.”
On learning that the Higgs Boson is responsible for particles having mass, he suggested the Sawdust one might contribute “Er… smell, maybe?” He added that the Nobel Prize committee could send the prize to his home address “or to the bus depot, where they’ll look after it for me if I’m out on my route when it arrives.” He also said he’d be willing to collect it himself in Oslo, “only could it not be in July or August, as we’re always short-staffed then.”