In 2002, the future Nobel Prize-winner Peter Higgs joined several fellow physicists at a dinner in Edinburgh. Drinks flowed and the professional invective followed. According to a report published in the Scotsman the following morning, the gathered physicists were frustrated by, and perhaps a little jealous of, Stephen Hawking.
"It is very difficult to engage him [Hawking] in discussion, and so he has got away with pronouncements in a way that other people would not," Higgs is quoted as saying. "His celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have."
Higgs had reason to feel aggrieved. Two years earlier, Hawking had placed a very public $100 bet that the Higgs boson — a subatomic particle theorized in the 1960s — would never be found. In professional physics and cosmology, where being right is the surest route to professional rewards, it was tantamount to an insult. And Higgs, whose legacy was that particle, took it personally.