It is one of the most important announcement in the past decades.
It confirms essentially most of what has been done in physics.
This year prizes is about something very small that makes all the difference.
I am rather surprised it has happened in my lifetime.
At CERN's foundation in 1954, the world of particle physics was a very different one.
Scientists were trying to come to grips with the plenty of particles observed in Nature.
They lacked of an overall framework to explain the basic constitution of matter and the forces that act upon them.
This framework would later become known as the Standard Model.
By the end of the decade CERN physicists were already providing insight into the weak interaction,
a force without which the Sun would not shine.
The 1960s we saw the birth of electro-weak theory, which unifies the weak and electromagnetic forces.
A vital part of this is a mechanism that accounts for the vastly different ranges of theses forces,
as well as for particle masses.
These were beautiful concepts but they needed experimental evidences to back them up.
Particle physicists embarked on a global search for the carriers of the weak forces, W and Z bosons,
whose existence would prove the theorists were right.
A major breakthrough came in 1973 with the discovery at the PS.
The Gargamelle experiment identified weak neutron currents, tell tale science of the existence of Z bosons.
This ground break result brought the first evidence for the electro-weak theory.
Our physicist were on the right track, but direct detection of weak bosons would take another decade.
In 1976, CERN brought the SPS on stream.
Larger and more powerful than CERN's previous accelerators,
the SPS would go on to collide protons with anti-protons.
By 1983 SPS experiments had seen W and Z bosons.
Their long way to discovery led to the Nobel Prize for CERN's Carlo Rubia and Simon Van der Meer.
"This discovery of the W and Z is not the end, it is the beginning."
The next step begun when LEP, the 27 km large electron-positron collider, was switched on, in 1989.
It was designed to study weak bosons in detail.
The LEP collaborations soon had their first major result.
By measuring the decays of Z bosons, they found that Nature has three,
and only three, families of matter particles.
Everything we see in the Universe is made of the lightest family.
During its 11 years of operation, LEP placed electro-weak theory on solid experimental ground.
The Standard Model was almost complete, but what accounted for the mass of particles?
There was one last missing piece of the puzzle to
uncover: the physical manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.
A particle called the Higgs boson.
Its discovery was in sight. With the construction of Large Hadron Collider,
CERN would take its first steps into a new century of discovery .
"Today is a special day."
On the 4th of July 2012, the CMS and Atlas collaborations announced the discovery of Higgs bosons.
"Theses results are the outcome of the ingenui division
and painstaking work of our community from accelerator to detector instrumentation, computing and physics."
"We have observed the new bosons with mass of 125.3 plus minus 0.6 GeV, at 4.97 deviations."
It was the final evidence the world has been waiting for, heating headlines around the world,
winning the Noble Prize for Peter Higgs and François Englert and cementing CERN's pivotal role in the development of the Standard Model.
The Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but many questions about our Universe remain unanswered,
mysteries that will captivate future generations of scientists and lead them to untold discoveries.