The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the particle and its energy field. But the LHC didn't do it alone. The search has been a massive, costly and unprecedented international effort that began thousands of miles away, at another atom smasher beneath the Illinois prairie.