We found a boson, probably the Higgs boson.

And in fact, here's an example the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson.

So, first, we need to make sure that the boson we found is actually the Higgs boson.

Oh, right, the cherry's the Higgs boson.

Now, where does the Higgs boson come in?

Almost! The splash itself is the Higgs boson.

Okay, but where does this Higgs boson fit into things?

The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field.

By finding the Higgs boson, we know that the Higgs field exists.

By measuring these particles, you learn about the properties of the boson.

It takes an excitation of the Higgs field to produce the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson has this job of giving masses to all the other elementary particles.

Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important.

And that's the job of the Higgs boson, that's the job of the two bottom lines.

Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson?

Now, we live in an age where multi billion dollar pieces of machinery are looking for the Higgs boson.

This new boson lives for only a very short time before it breaks down or decays into lighter, more stable particles.

Well, the Standard Model predicts how often and in what ways the Higgs boson would decay to the various, lighter particles.

Right, so it seems like finding this Higgs boson gives a direction for exploration, a bit like that Columbus guy heading west.

As of July 4th, 2012, the Higgs Boson is the last fundamental piece of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered experimentally.

In the same way this universal Higgs snow field, is made up out of little quanta, those quanta are like snowflakes, that's what we call the Higgs boson.

First, just like the electron is an excitation in the electron field, the Higgs Boson is simply a particle which is an excitation of the everywhere permeating Higgs field.

Right now we are sifting through these many, many petabytes of data to look for signals of the Higgs boson, as no doubt people have heard in the news.

Depending on how those different types of quark or the electron and muon, depending on how they connect to that Higgs field, that Higgs boson, we believe they get different masses.

But, you might ask, why was the Higgs Boson included in the standard model, alongside well known particles like electrons and photons and quarks, if it hadn't been discovered back then in the 1970s?