What these explanations lack, and is so hard for the educated layman to understand, I think, is why this is so important to physicists. If you were a "layman" reading Maxwell's work (or rather Oliver Heaviside's, who put it in the much simpler form we know), you question would be similar: "I understand about photons and the electromagnetic force and the coolness of predicting the speed of light using theoretical mean. But what is it useful for?" Mathematicians face the same difficulty in explaining Riemann's hypothesis or the Poincare conjecture to people.
Someone needs to explain the following clearly:
* What if the Higgs boson doesn't exist? does this mean Gigg' theory is incorrect?
* What is Higgs' theory is totally incorrect?
* What if the boson has mass 10M (or 10000M) rather than M, how would the world (universe) be different?
* If the boson is found, are we "done", i.e. can we proceed with a coming up with a GUT?
I think I remember my father telling me about a cat who wandered into a particle collider as it was being built. It died inside, and nobody realized it until they tried to pump it down to a vacuum - and kept failing, because the dead animal kept outgassing.
I can't find any corroborating evidence after a 5 minute google search, so it might be an urban legend - but regardless, the answer to the next-to-last question is pretty well known.
They are not trying to explain scientific thought. they are trying to explain the theory they are experimenting to prove.
They cover your 1st topic fine (read only 1st and 2nd links from the page. second link was the best in my humble opinion). Your other 3 topics are just required if explaining scientific thought model.
Someone needs to explain the following clearly:
* What if the Higgs boson doesn't exist? does this mean Gigg' theory is incorrect?
* What is Higgs' theory is totally incorrect?
* What if the boson has mass 10M (or 10000M) rather than M, how would the world (universe) be different?
* If the boson is found, are we "done", i.e. can we proceed with a coming up with a GUT?