On the BBC:

This is without doubt in my opinion the biggest scientific discovery of my lifetime and without doubt one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time, so I’m tremendously excited… This day will go down as one of the great days in the history of science I think, and that’s not overly hyperbolic.

This is a prediction that was made almost 50 years ago. And the prediction is that the universe, everywhere, empty space, everywhere you look, every little cubic centimetre of space in front of you and inside your body and across the universe, is rammed full of Higgs particles, and everything that makes up your body, the little subatomic particles in your hand, are bouncing off them, and that’s how they get their mass.

And more than that the theory said that these Higgs particles condensed out into empty space less than a billionth of a second after the universe began. It sounds very esoteric and fundamental. But what we’ve shown today is that’s right. That’s actually how the universe works. So it’s one of the central planks of our understanding of how everything in the universe works.

And even though, throughout my whole career as a particle physicist of 20 years now, this theory has been there, I think the realisation that it’s actually right is quite shocking, actually; I’m quite shocked that such a strange thing has been shown to be true.