What's a Higgs?

The Higgs boson's original name is the Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble boson. For understandable reasons no one uses the long name.

It's gotten quite a bit of attention from the media, especially since it was dubbed "The God Particle" and because it was successfully proved to exist in the July of 2012 at CERN (<3). I'm going to give you guys a short summary on how you can imagine what the Higgs boson does - (unfortunately it's not God; it's just a particle).

First off we need to introduce the concept of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a special field that is everywhere - imagine an invisible web filling out the whole space in the universe!

Ok now instead of the field imagine a cocktail party full of people evenly distributed.

These nice people represent the Higgs field.

When a celebrity enters the room the people are all exited about the famous newcomer and gather around him/her.

The celebrity is actually any kind of particle - for example a proton, a neutron or an electron. The new mass of people around her make it harder for her to move and makes  her and the people  accumulated around her harder to stop (if they move together) - in other words her inertia grew! She has now successfully gained mass!

So the Higgs field gives particles their mass - a very elemental property of physical things.

The Higgs boson? In the same room, imagine someone from the outside whispering a rumor to one of our Higgs field representatives.

Since that person has an interesting story, many of his/her neighbors group around him/her and a local cluster comes to life. The rumor spreads on its own, and wherever it is there's a group of people talking about it.

That newly-formed cluster is a Higgs boson. It's actually a particle with mass, that was created from an unusual excitation of the Higgs field. This is why the finding of the boson was important - it proves (or at least strongly suggests) that the Higgs field, the mass-giving field, exists!