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History was then feted with beer and champagne.

Scientists began to pore over what the find could mean.

“(The Higgs) has been anticipated for more than four decades and were it not there theorists all over the world would have been back to their drawing boards in desperation,” said Anthony Thomas at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

CERN physicist Yves Sirois agreed.

“This could the Higgs boson that has been found, which may shed light on how matter came into being at the very start of the Universe, a thousandth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang,” he told AFP.

“It may be the Higgs boson, but it may also be something far bigger, which opens the door towards a new theory that goes beyond the Standard Model.”

What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs boson cannot be seen but scientists believe it exists. Why? Because scientists also believe that something called the Higgs field exists and the Higgs boson is part of that field.

Hmmm, so what’s the Higgs field?

The Higgs field is everywhere in space, or so scientists believe. Think of the Higgs field as oil and everything that passes through it is slowed down. Higgs bosons “stick” to particles of matter, dragging on them — they give them mass.

If the Higgs boson can’t be seen, how do you detect it?



You spend $4.4-billion building a 27-kilometre underground tunnel that provides work for about 10,000 scientists and engineers. You then send protons whizzing around the tunnel at about the speed of light until they crash into each other. It is at this point — where man has created conditions similar to those at the birth of the universe — that a glimpse of the Higgs boson may be seen. But scientists will have to be quick because the Higgs boson is believed to decay almost instantly after it interacts with other particles.