At the heart of this problem are two numbers, two extremely dangerous numbers. These are properties of the universe that we can measure,and they're extremely dangerous because if they were different, even by a tiny bit, then the universe as we know it would not exist. The first of these numbers is associated with the discovery that was made a few kilometers from this hall, at CERN, home of this machine, the largest scientific device ever built by the human race, the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC whizzes subatomic particles around a 27-kilometer ring, getting them closer and closer to the speed of light before smashing them into each other inside gigantic particle detectors. On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced to the world that they'd spotted a new fundamental particle being created at the violent collisions at the LHC: the Higgs boson.