Standing on these shoulders, later theorists crafted the two standard models: one to explain the particles and forces, another to make sense of the origins and evolution of the cosmos at large. The standard model of particle physics is particularly impressive in that it describes the workings of all known matter in a neat set of equations that could fit on a T-shirt. Its final flourish came in the form of the Higgs boson, a mass-giving particle conceived on a mathematical hunch in the 1960s and first sighted at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland, in 2012.