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?