The Higgs boson is a theoretical entity of the kind that scientists like to call non-trivial. It is the thing that makes matter massive. Without it, galaxies, stars, planets, particle physicists and politicians could not exist. The 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva is certainly not trivial. It was built to replicate conditions that must have existed in the first billionth of a second of the big bang. So the much-rumoured announcement from Cern today will not be trivial either. But it will not be decisive. The most anyone can expect is a hint of a glimpse of a ghost of a footprint along a spoor that could possibly lead to the Higgs. Even if experimenters have tracked exactly the creature that the theorists predict, that will not be the end of the pursuit. Discovery will simply raise more fundamental questions: that is why, long before the LHC was switched on, the particle physicists of Europe and America began devising plans for an International Linear Collider, to answer questions raised by the discovery of the Higgs or, even more thrillingly, the discovery that it does not exist – that something is wrong with the standard model of the making of a universe. So the hunt goes on. The answers to all the cosmic questions of life, the universe and everything are hidden in the fireworks that accompanied the birth of all matter and light, space and time. The marvel is that, 13.7 billon years later, creatures on a disorderly little planet on the edge of an inconsequential galaxy have begun to pursue such non-trivial questions.