The best layman explanation for the Higgs Boson : (from the second link on that page)
Higgs proposed that ".. the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. .....
We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg's field, and this is the Higgs boson."
Not being particularly scientifically-minded, I really like the third one, David Miller's:
"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her..."
A perfect analogy given the intended recipient, I thought.
I like that one, too. But then I read the others and they seem to give a totally different picture, like: symmetric pencils falling in space. It is interesting to read how the different physicists visualize and explain this concept.
And with that comment I'd like to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y
Physicist Richard Feynman describes an experience where he and a fellow student visualized the elementary concept of counting in different ways... "What we're really doing is having some big translation scheme going on where we're translating what this fellow says into our images."
It’s important to remember that these are not the way that physicists think about the Higgs boson. This is the way they try to explain it without any equation, and not using the words like "Lie Group" or "Gauge invariant". The problem is that explain the Higgs bosons in an easy way is very difficult to. (It is like explaining one of the more obscure posts of Raymond Chen to someone that never had seen a computer.)
Last year I took a course about particle physics and we saw the equations of the standard model.
I like more the explanation that involves "pencils". I think that it is possible to expand the non-technical words and get something like the correct theory for Higgs bosons (for example: pencil->vector). In this explanation there are a lot of details missing of course, for example: Why the Z and W particles have different mass? How do the electrons get their mass? What is the difference between the waves that rotate the pencils and the waves that stretch the pencils? I think that these simplifications are sensible to get a short explanation.
I don’t like the explanation that uses viscous forces. The main problem is that with viscous forces the particles "lost" energy and the particles should become still. The real effect of the Higgs field is similar to the apparent effective mass of an object in a fluid. To accelerate the object it is necessary to accelerate some of the fluid that is around it, so it is more difficult and the object have a bigger apparent mass. This is unrelated to the viscosity and happens even when the fluid has no viscosity.
Another problem with this explanation is that the when the particles move they don’t drag any Higgs bosons (real or virtual). So the mental image is wrong. A possible way to see this is that as the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is not zero, the particles can "bounce" against the vacuum and the result is something in the movement equation that looks like a mass. It sounds strange or even ridiculous, but in the problem is not in the equations, but in the "translations" to non-technical words.
That was what I was thinking too. But then they are saying electromagnetic field actually follows this "aether" like model where it interacts with photons. Now they are trying to prove that the same should be true for Higg's fields too which gives particle mass. Check the second article.
to me any meaningful theory of mass would have inertial and gravitational mass equivalence at its heart (and/or explained immediately and naturally). Higgs mass is just a theoretical workaround to provide for W,Z bosons masses. It is just a descriptive theory, i.e. "it can be thought as if it was happening that way" , i.e. any of the 1 pagers mentioned can itself replace the actual Higgs mass theory, and we'll still would have the same result, incl. that now we would be looking for and not able to find the pensils suspended in the vacuum instead of Higgs boson.
similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field [..]
That explanation just lost 90% of its audience, who have no clear conception of what an 'electromagnetic field' is. Physicists, including myself, can't help themselves in taking things for granted that their audience really doesn't understand.
Higgs proposed that ".. the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. ..... We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg's field, and this is the Higgs boson."