Physicists confirmed a particle that had been predicted 48 years before they found it

In 1964, Peter Higgs and others proposed a field that gives fundamental particles their mass, implying a new particle should exist. It took the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre ring smashing protons at near light speed, until 2012 to produce enough collisions to confirm the Higgs boson. Higgs and Francois Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the prediction.

— CERN / ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson — Physics Letters B, 2012