The Higgs Boson ("God Particle")

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5WwYNr2qHXQ/RsgPg02stuI/AAAAAAAAAhw/ujR0R7kgtVQ/s400/HostHiggsBoson1.jpg  

Artist Imagery of Higgs Boson

     In 1979 two of the four fundamental forces were combined into one; electromagnetic and the weak nuclear force became the electroweak force. Although this is a great leap towards "grand unification", there is a bit of a problem: force carriers. The electromagnetic force uses photons, which have no mass at all. Weak nuclear force's carrier, the W and Z bosons, on the other hand are eighty times more massive than a proton. If these were originally one and the same, how can this be? How do particles get mass? Theories give the credit to the Higgs boson operating in its Higgs field. 

     Peter Higgs thought that a vacuum (empty space...not the one that cleans your floors) is actually not empty, but instead has force fields and virtual particles up the wazoo. Einstein stated massless particles move at the speed of light while particles with mass are limited to speeds below this rate. Lets suppose then that elementary particles are massless without this field in the vacuum and everywhere else and the Higgs acts as a speed limit. The slower the particle moves through the field the more mass it would have. Photons would not be affected by the field thus giving them the ability to move at the speed of light and be massless. Imagine a vat of tar that Patricia Particle is trying to move through, with tar monsters coming out to latch onto her. Phil Photon would be able to just ignore the tar and tar monsters and glide right through (at the speed of light). Hence Patricia would have mass, unlike Phil, all thank to the Higgs field and boson.

--Alice R. 

Sources:  

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http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/forces/higgs.html