The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.

The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. The protons run through six different detectors, which run different experiments and the amount of electricity that powers it is incredible - 120 Megawatts - about as much as all of the homes in the neighboring Swiss Canton of Geneva. This enables the Collider to get protons to 99.99% of the speed of light. The Collider has about 9,300 magnets, which are super-cooled to -456.25 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a circular path that's about 16.8 miles long and about 330 feet below the surface. To get that acceleration, the scientists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider, which is buried under the French/Swiss border. That's because in order to find the Higgs boson, you have to accelerate a proton to nearly the speed of light - not an easy task. For one thing, the only way to discover subatomic particles like the Higgs boson, an extraordinary amount of energy is needed. Much as we'd like to believe that science can be done by lone geniuses, toiling in their basement laboratories, the fact of the matter is that discovering the fundamental secrets of the universe doesn't come cheap. Although there are a lot of different subatomic particles, the Higgs boson is of particular importance because it's what, according to the Standard Model, gives everything in the universe its mass. This is an important discovery because it verifies the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson. Yesterday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that's consistent with that of the Higgs boson.

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