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You may have seen a slew of articles about the Higgs Boson particle in the news recently without really understanding or why it's important and I'm hoping to help with that at least a little bit.
There are a couple of things in the universe that we don't entirely understand, some of them so we imagine to be natural laws, and sometimes immutable. The LHC has been working to study a number of results from smashing protons together at incredible speeds. One of the things they're looking for is the Higgs Boson particle. This particle is a theoretical explanation for the existence of Mass. Essentially the Higgs Boson particle acts as a friction generator for every other particle.
Without the Higgs Boson particles would just zoom around at the speed of light, but the Higgs Boson, theoretically, has mass and it groups around other particles and slows them down. The reason it is referred to as the God Particle is because scientist theorize that the Higgs Boson gives ALL matter mass.
Being able to find this particle closes up one of the holes that exist in current physics theory crafting. Not only does the theory suggest that the Higgs Boson has mass, but that the more Higgs Bosons are attracted to a particle the greater mass it will have.
If Higgs Bosons are found it will allow new avenues of approach for other fundamental Physics concepts that are not entirely understood such as gravity (recently Stephen Hawking indicated that the universe exists because natural laws such as gravity exist, a curious sort of explanation to me).
More importantly, if they conclude that they can't find it there is a much more interesting possibility... that the structure and operation of the universe on even the most minuscule level is more complicated than we've even imagined.
/rant
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