In 2011, scientists were close to an important breakthrough...
in understanding the origins of the universe.
As a newcomer, you realise that you have the privilege to be there in the right
place at the right time. If you had been born 10 years later, or 10 years earlier,
you might have not been able to contribute in the same way.
Andre was one of the scientists looking for the Higgs boson...
the so-called God particle.
Here at Cern, scientists have been searching for the Higgs deep under the
Swiss-French border using the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.
Inside the Large Hadron Collider, high-energy particle beams...
were being smashed together at great speed.
The temperature that is in these collisions
is such that you go back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang so things that could happen
a fraction of a second after The Big Bang, happen again.
Shortly after The Big Bang, when the universe was created, the Higgs boson came into being and
gave all the other particles substance, which is why some refer to it as the God particle.
This is the stumbling block. We need to know if this particle exists or not.
Leading up to 2012, particles were colliding at even higher speeds...
and Andre's team saw some exciting results.
We started getting this bigger picture coming into place.
It really looked like, Ok there is something at this particular mass and it's very significant.
In the past few minutes, scientists here have reported that one of the LHC's experiments
have found a faint signal of the Higgs.
You start doubting yourself. Are we sure that we checked everything? Are we sure we don't have
correlations or that we did not miscallibrate the detector?
But what’s causing huge excitement here is that people saying another experiment at the LLC
using different methods has also found a blip in the same place.
And that's where what I really wanted to see was
the result of the other experiment. Did they see something like us?
Then the announcement of a press conference atCern...
sparked huge excitement.
The rival teams were going to present their findings.
We were running so fast and we were so focused in delivering something, it really was in the
morning of the seminar that I saw this huge queue going around the main building here at
Cern and that's when I started realising the importance.
Today is also a special day
because we hear two presentations on the update on the search for a certain particle.
Conclude by saying that we have observed a new boson.
Extremely clean except one big spike. Here, in this region.
The moment when I saw the results of the other experiment that I realised,
OK, they see the same thing. Wow.
Scientists in Switzerland say they think they discovered the particle
which gives everything in the universe its size and shape.
And full of emotion at the news the British scientists who predicted the particle’s existence.
For me, it's really an incredible thing that happened in my lifetime.
I've never heard such a loud clap as I heard then. It was really thunderous.
This day will go down as one of the great days in the history of science.
We now have this new tool and we can learn more about
what nature is and how the universe works by using this tool.