3604 July 2012: Scientists announce the discovery of the Higgs boson
In 60 words
On 4 July 2012, scientists at CERN near Geneva announced that the Large Hadron Collider had found a new particle matching the Higgs boson, predicted in 1964. It helps explain why basic particles have mass. Peter Higgs and François Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.