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Hello, one weekend in 1964, the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs was walking in the

Kanghorn Mountains.

When he returned to his laboratory in Edinburgh the following Monday, he declared to his

colleagues that he just

experienced his one big idea and now had an answer to the mystery of how matter in

universe got its mass. That big idea took many years of refining, but it's now generated so much international interest

and at such an important place in physics that well over one billion pounds is being spent on

a collider in Cern in the hope that he was right.

It's the biggest science project on Earth.

The question to find the Higgs boson, a fundamental constituent of nature,

that if it does exist, has such a central role in defining the universe that it's also known as God's Particle.

What is the Higgs boson?

Why is it so important to scientists and how they're planning to find it?

With me to voyage into the quantum realm of the Higgs boson is Professor Roger

Kashmir, the former director of research at Cern and now principal of Brazone College

Oxford, David Wark, Professor of Experimental Physics at Imperial College London and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,

and Jim Alka Lili, senior lecture in physics at the University of Surrey.

Jim Alka Lili, before we start, why is this quest so important, just as it were a headline?

Well, I think ever since the ancient Greeks, we've been trying to understand the fundamental

building blocks of everything in the universe.

...