The Announcement

After half a century of waiting, the drama was intense. Physicists slept overnight outside the auditorium to get seats for the seminar at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland.

Ten thousand miles away on the other side of the planet, at the world's most prestigious international particle physics conference in Melbourne, hundreds of physicists from every corner of the globe lined up to hear the seminar streamed live from Geneva.

But first let's look at some background.