You’re in London to receive the 1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science. Aren’t you bored of medals and prizes by now?
I think I shall have to clear some handkerchiefs and things out of another drawer to find room. There are quite a lot.
How does it feel to have achieved immortality?
I describe it as notoriety rather than immortality. It continues to be an embarrassment how easily I get recognised on the streets of Edinburgh going to do my shopping. There’s always somebody who wants to take a selfie or something. It’s nice but there’s too much of it.
Many people thought the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider would be just the start, yet five years on nothing more has been discovered.
Yes, that’s rather worrying. The hope has been that we would discover things to connect particle physics much more with cosmology, dark matter and that kind of thing. It doesn’t seem to be happening yet.