What these explanations lack, and is so hard for the educated layman to understand, I think, is <i>why</i> this is so important to physicists. If you were a "layman" reading Maxwell's work (or rather Oliver Heaviside's, who put it in the much simpler form we know), you question would be similar: "I understand about photons and the electromagnetic force and the coolness of predicting the speed of light using theoretical mean. But what is it useful for?" Mathematicians face the same difficulty in explaining Riemann's hypothesis or the Poincare conjecture to people.<p>Someone needs to explain the following clearly:<p>* What if the Higgs boson doesn't exist? does this mean Gigg' theory is incorrect?<p>* What is Higgs' theory is totally incorrect?<p>* What if the boson has mass 10M (or 10000M) rather than M, how would the world (universe) be different?<p>* If the boson is found, are we "done", i.e. can we proceed with a coming up with a GUT?
That's a five-page explanation, each by a different author with a unique level of skill. And taken together, a better explanation than five pages written by the one author of median skill. However even more efficient is reading the two best pages, which IMO are<p><a href="http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs3.html" rel="nofollow">http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs3.htm...</a>
and
<a href="http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs5.html" rel="nofollow">http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs5.htm...</a>
The best layman explanation for the Higgs Boson : (from the second link on that page)<p>Higgs proposed that ".. the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. .....
We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg's field, and this is the Higgs boson."
Sean Carroll did it in 420 characters:<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741225250963456" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741225250963456</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741443379920896" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741443379920896</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741774100799488" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741774100799488</a><p>(Background: <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/13/3tweets/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/13/...</a>)
Unfortunately, the LHC has not found the Higgs so far, and it's not looking good, with only a narrow window remaining:<p><a href="http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3864" rel="nofollow">http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3864</a>