Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1912 in an experiment on a table top. The LHC will be producing its first major results by 2012, involving teams of thousands and apparatus that is bigger than Rutherford's entire laboratory. How did science come to this, and what are the questions the LHC hopes to answer? What is Higgs' boson, and is it really Higgs that invented it? I will explore the role of symmetry and asymmetry in physics, and illustrate how the ideas that have been associated with Higgs' name have a long history.