On 4th July 2012, at a site 100 meters underground near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at the the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) observed a new particle, the so-called ‘God Particle’, the Higgs bosson. Scientists understood that elementary particles had no mass when they were created. Some elementary particles like photons, the particles of light, stayed this way, but other particles like electrons obtained mass. Without mass, elementary particles would not be bound together to form atoms, and the universe would not have formed as we know it - and neither would life.
Scientists theorised that a force field came into existence after the Big Bang, the Higgs field, and that when certain elementary particles interacted with this field they gained their mass. This omnipresent field cannot be manipulated and is not observable, but it’s quantum particle, the Higgs boson, is. The discovery of this particle in the summer of 2012 proved the Higgs field existed, and achieved a major stride forward in solving the mystery of how particles gain their mass.
Several years before, in 1989, a scientist also working at CERN invented the World Wide Web. It wasn’t until 2021 that these two major accomplishments coming out of CERN came together in a completely unforeseen way…