Having a smashing time in 2010 (Image: ATLAS/CERN)

The world’s biggest experiment is primed to answer one of the universe’s biggest questions: what is the origin of mass? But an unexpected particle could yet steal the show.

In CERN’s 27-kilometre tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider will start smashing high-energy protons head-on in 2010. The shrapnel is expected to reveal the presence of the one missing member of the tribe of particles predicted by the standard model of physics: the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow elementary particles with mass. But the Higgs is unlikely to …