Breakthroughs in science are all about trumping probabilities. Today Peter Higgs, the British scientist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, is claiming that there is a better than 90 per cent chance that the most elusive particle in physics will be found within the next few years. Just how big a breakthrough is this? This big: it means that there is now more chance of our solving a puzzle than has been teasing scientists since before Cher began her first farewell tour, than there is of the average passenger travelling through Terminal 5 finding his luggage on the carousel.

The Higgs boson is often called “the God particle” because it would supply the crucial missing piece of the jigsaw of the so-called Standard Model by which scientists describe the building blocks of nature - namely, the reason why matter has mass. Without mass, the Universe, and life, would be impossible. So particle physicists know the Higgs boson logically must exist, but they've never been able actually to identify one.

But science, like a shark, must keep swimming to stay alive. With every solution to a scientific riddle, a little romance dies. Luckily, there remain other puzzles to pummel a scientist's brain. Fermat's Last Theorem may finally have been cracked. But what of Goldbach's Conjecture? Or the Riemann Hypothesis? These are bittersweet sirens to any scientist, luring him into a domain of prickly pleasure. The Higgs boson may soon be tamed. But what about the Collatz Problem?

The journey of discovery requires that once the Higgs boson is identified, there will, surely, be even smaller problems for science to solve.