I think the point is that defining authorship of intellectual products is a bit like putting authorship on words (even common ones). They are always part of a larger shared discourse. That is not to remove merit from individuals but to acknowledge that merit is not quantitative and could be stretched to fit political motives.
Very interesting article. It somewhat reminds of current differences in academic philosophy where some distinguish between "analytical" and "continental" schools.
Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs particles "they don't exist under normal condition" is loosely true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is nothing but a "quantum" of a "field". Fields pervade all physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta) simply represent a local state of observable things. A field can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be "extracted".
The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.