Big Bang Thought of the Day by Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs, “The Big Bang made the universe explode into existence. The Higgs boson made it stay.” The universe formed 13.8 billion years ago. But matter could not exist without mass. In 1964, Peter Higgs proposed a solution. His Higgs boson explains why particles gained weight after the Big Bang. Confirmed in 2012 at CERN, it settled decades of cosmic theory conflicts. This discovery reshaped modern physics and cosmology forever.