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Historians of physics will surely remember 2012 as the year when the Higgs boson – or a particle that looks very much like it – was finally discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the discovery was picked by us as the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year for 2012. The choice was an obvious one – too obvious perhaps – but it was one that we could hardly have overlooked.