10 years since the 'God Particle': What it revealed & why it matters

Higgs boson allows scientists to make better guesses about the universe's structure in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang

In July 2012, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) team at CERN, the pan-European Organisation for Nuclear Research, announced proof of the existence of the so-called Higgs boson. This elusive particle had been theorised back in the 1960s by Peter Higgs, and several other physicists, working independently in three different teams. 

If it existed, it would explain why most fundamental particles had mass. Higgs & co suggested a mechanism, now known unoriginally as the Higgs Mechanism, where the particle worked with a field (the Brout-Englert-Higgs Field) to explain how it imparted mass.

Did it exist? The Standard Model of physics did