"Higgs Boson" Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Physics

We are a bit late on this, but James Morgan at BBC News has the story at Higgs boson scientists win Nobel prize in physics, where the following explanation is given for what a Higgs boson is in the context of the "mass" of particles:

"Scientists' best theory for why different things have mass is the "Higgs field" - where mass can be seen as a measure of the resistance to movement. The "Higgs field" is shown here as a room of physicists chatting among themselves.

A well-known scientist walks into the room and causes a bit of a stir - attracting admirers with each step and interacting strongly with them - signing autographs and stopping to chat.

As she becomes surrounded by admiring fans, she finds it harder to move across the room - in this analogy, she acquires mass due to the "field" of fans, with each fan acting like a single Higgs boson.

If a less popular scientist enters the room, only a small crowd gathers, with no-one clamouring for attention. He finds it easier to move across the room - by analogy, his interaction with the bosons is lower, and so he has a lower mass."

So that's the new standard model of the universe, allegedly, in modern theoretical physics, without gravity of course, which turns out to be a bother.

If gravity were added, we suspect the floor under the scientists in the above model would collapse at some point of idolizing boson accumulation and then what would we have?

The Guardian wrote more recently in The Higgs boson does a new trick (probably):

"In the Standard Model of physics, the fundamental building blocks of nature are quarks (which live inside hadrons) and leptons (such as the electron, and its heavier siblings, the muon and the tau). These building blocks interact with each other via fundamental forces carried by bosons - the photon carries electromagnetism, the W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, and the gluon carries the strong force.

All those particles (except the photon and the gluon, which are massless) acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs boson, the discovery of which was announced last year on the fourth of July."

We always wonder where those "fundamental forces" that are taken as givens come from, or where the boson gets its "interactive" power, but this does not appear to bother the physicists. The main thing is that the current math formulas work and they get enough "bumps" in the hadron colliders.

Somehow, we think these epicyclic-type theoretical models do not yet really explain the "real" universe. Give it another few thousand years, at least.