"Armed with the most advanced mathematics and a good dose of imagination, a generation of theoretical physicists conceived the idea that the universe must have undergone a transformation, after a tenth of a billionth of a second from the Big Bang. At that instant, the entire structure of space-time crystallized into a new form, following a phase transition, just as water turns into ice below zero degrees. [...] The same physicists also realized that this idea so suggestive as to sound like science fiction implied the existence of a new particle, a granule of the substance that permeates all of space-time. Data presented yesterday at Cern show that that particle-the Higgs boson - really exists, corroborating the fantastic story of the cosmic phase transition."