Since no such massless particles were known at the time, Shaw and his supervisor Abdus Salam chose not to publish their work,[5] while Pauli criticized Yang's presentation of his work with Mills in February 1954.[6] Shortly after Yang and Mills published their paper in October 1954, Salam encouraged Shaw to publish his work to mark his contribution. Shaw declined, and instead it only forms a chapter of his PhD thesis published in 1956.[7][8] The idea was set aside until 1960, when the concept of particles acquiring mass through symmetry breaking in massless theories was put forward, initially by Jeffrey Goldstone, Yoichiro Nambu, and Giovanni Jona-Lasinio.
