Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs didn't know he had won

(UPI) -- Professor Peter Higgs only found out that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics after a woman congratulated him on the street.

Higgs said a former neighbor pulled up in her car as he was returning from lunch in Edinburgh. "She congratulated me on the news and I said 'oh, what news?'" he said.

"I heard more about it obviously when I got home and started reading the messages." He doesn’t own a cellphone.

The professor shares this year's physics prize with Francois Englert of Belgium. Past winners of the prize include Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.

The 84-year-old was recognized for his work on the theory of the particle which shares his name, the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” is said to give matter its substance.

"How do I feel? Well, obviously I'm delighted and rather relieved in a sense that it's all over. It has been a long time coming,” Higgs said while speaking at a media conference at the University of Edinburgh. "In terms of later events, it seemed to me for many years that the experimental verification might not come in my lifetime.”