SCIENTISTS at CERN - the makers of the Large Hadron Collider - are tonight expected to announce they found what they came for.

The Higgs Boson is known as the God Particle, or the Holy Grail of physics.

But what is it and why is it important?

LET'S START BIG

If you recall anything from school science, you might remember that stuff is made from molecules.

Molecules are made from groups of atoms.

Inside an atom are electrons surrounding a nucleus.

Inside the nucleus are protons and neutrons.

IF YOU'VE GOT THAT, READ ON

Protons and neutrons are made out of quarks.

Quarks come in six flavours - up and down; charm and strange; top and bottom.

Which isn't important apart from the fact that QUARKS HAZ A FLAVA.

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So now we've dissected the building blocks of stuff down from a molecule, which you thought was tiny but is actually elephantine compared to where we're going, which is the aforementioned quark.

And quarks are one of the three groups that make up matter - quarks, leptons and bosons.

So quarks (remember, six flavours) make the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom.

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One of the bosons (there are four flavours) sticks them together and is called a gluon, which sounds like glue and is therefore probably the easiest concept out of all of this comprehend.

If you're a Trekker, you might be interested to know that the boson that blows things apart is called a photon.

And one of the leptons (there's also six flavours) is the electron.

I THINK I GOT IT.

NOW TELL ME WHERE THE HIGGS BOSON FITS IN.

The problem with all this is gravity.

If everything is made up of these particles, what's gravity grabbing hold of and making sure it all sticks to Earth?

In short, what makes all these particles actually weigh something? What gives them substance?

All matter has mass. We know that, because we can see it and feel it.

But how does it get mass? The theory is that we get mass from a particle that hasn't been discovered yet - the Higgs Boson.

And for the Higgs Boson to exist, the entire universe has to be wrapped in something called the Higgs Field.

As particles fly through the Higgs Field, they pick up mass. The Higgs Boson binds it all together.

If you think it's all sounding a bit like the way George Lucas explained the Force in The Phantom Menace, that's because it is. Except with less lightsabers.

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SO IT'S THE FORCE? FTW? THEY'RE MAKING IT ALL UP?



Well, insofar that theorists make anything up.

So they spent $4bn and enlisted the help of 10,000 scientists to build the Large Hadron Collider.

It has many tasks, but one main one - to find the Higgs Boson.

OH YEAH? HOW'S IT GOING TO DO THAT THEN?

How's it been doing that, you mean. Since 2008, the LHC has been smashing atoms together and watching them explode back into their pre-gluon states.

Basically, as in the moments a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

By watching how they reform back into matter (or anti-matter, about which there are several awesome Star Trek breakthroughs you can read about here), scientists are answering the biggest questions in the universe.

Namely, how was it made and, when we find out, what can we do with the knowledge?

If you're thinking teleportation, hoverboards and photon drives, don't. Because that may actually be the case and if it doesn't turn out to be true, the pain would be too unbearable.

They've pretty much got more of it downpat than humans probably should be responsible for.

For instance, last year, an LHC rival in the US, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, made gluon soup.

For physicists, finding the Higgs Boson is like the day you first got a Magic Eye picture to work.

From then on, everything makes sense.

SO WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON'T FIND THE GOD PARTICLE?

That's easy. We:

a) Throw out all the particle physics and quantum dynamics theories, or

b) Build a bigger LHC. Oh, wait... they already have.

Peter Farquhar is the former Technology Editor of news.com.au. He has been known to get physics wrong before.