Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs wins Nobel prize for Physics

Heard about the Higgs Boson particle?

In the 1960s, Higgs and Englert theorized the existence of the particle to explain why matter has mass. Decades would pass before scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, were able to confirm its existence.

Finding the particle — often referred to as the "God particle"

— required teams of thousands of scientists and mountains of data from trillions of colliding protons in the world's biggest atom smasher — CERN's Large Hadron Collider — which produces energies simulating those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.

The collider cost a whopping $10 billion to build and run in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.

Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize For Physics on Tuesday for their research into the Higgs boson particle, nicknamed the "God particle."

Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist, and Higgs, a British physicist, earned the prestigious prize for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass subatomic particles" which was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the Nobel Prize Twitter feed reported.