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The Telegraph cast doubt on this explanation, wondering why such videos would need to be recorded, as this is not a political election, but a scientific experiment where the results are known in advance.

The Higgs has confounded scientists since 1964, when British physicist Peter Higgs helped lay the conceptual foundation for it.

If it exists, it would vindicate the so-called Standard Model of physics, which identifies the building blocks for matter and the particles that convey fundamental forces.

On the eve of the announcement, rumours flew about what CERN had in store. On Twitter, a conversational thread was called “Higgsteria,” and managed to fuel speculation and quash it at the same time.

“Whether or not the Higgs has been found, tomorrow will be exciting,” Professor Sir Peter Knight, president of Britain’s Institute of Physics said.

“If the Standard Model is confirmed via the discovery of the Higgs boson or whether we need to abandon and start re-writing the textbooks, it’s a historical day in science that we should all be proud of.”

A big question concerns the degree of probability to make a claim.

CERN physicists have said they will not make an announcement until they have proof — from two laboratories working independently at the mighty Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — that the risk of a statistical fluke is vanishingly small.

In scientific parlance, the goal is “five sigma,” meaning that there is just a 0.00006% chance that what the two laboratories found is a mathematical quirk.