According to newsround today, it’s thought that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered from the experiment using

Question: According to newsround today, it's thought that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered from the experiment using the Large Hadron Collider, although they can't be 100% sure. If it had been completely proven to be the mysterious Higgs Boson, how would this affect science and you're work?
- Keywords:
  boson,
  experiment,
  higgs,
  lhc,
  particle
Asked by smint to Mike, Tim, Tom on 5 Jul 2012.
- Tim Stephens answered on 5 Jul 2012:
  
  Mike’s the most closely involved with this.
  
  ‘Discovery’ of the Higgs boson is to do with putting together the pieces of our understanding of how the universe works. We already know about how atoms are made up, and about now protons and neutrons are built, but no-one knew how things had mass. The Higgs is the way that theoretical physicists predicted that things have mass.
  Yesterday, the people working at CERN announced that they had discovered evidence of the Higgs’ existence.
  
  It won’t affect my work at all though, since lasers still work the same today as they did yesterday.
- Tom Lister answered on 5 Jul 2012:
  
  As far as I understand, people have been pretty confident of the Higg’s existence for at least a decade – there have been a few observations that are consistent with the underlying theory. So I don’t think this is big news, other than it makes the current unified theory look a little bit more robust – they have only seen something that they think they could call a Higg’s boson at the moment of course, so it will be nice to see if they can repeat their finding.
  
  I love theoretical physcis, it fascinates me. We are also very lucky to be living in a time where there is steady progress in this area. However, whenever we find a set of fundamental partcles (the basic building blocks of all matter), we seem to find something that makes them. So once pepole thought that the atom was the smallest thing in the universe, then they found that you could describe this as being made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. Now we seem to have found all of the things that these are built of (including the Higg’s boson). Perhaps in your lifetime, we will being to look at what the Higg’s boson is made of?