The Large Hadron Collider is just beginning it's work as the highest energy proton proton collider ever made. After a brief introduction to the machine I will concentrate on it's main goal - the search for the Higgs boson. The Higgs is the missing particle from the Standard Model of particle physics which makes the model well behaved at high energy and generates particle mass. Something has to be there to do the job of the Higgs but there are hints of flaws in the simplest model that have led to many suggestions for new physics from particle compositeness to extra space-time dimensions.