What in the World Is the Higgs Boson? Ctd

We lay people still don't really know. Dennis Overbye, to quote one person who attempted to explain it to the masses, described it as "a kind of cosmic molasses". All those metaphors aren't really helping:

In this accumulation of metaphor, journalists like Overbye are only following the lead of the scientists themselves, who have long struggled to come up with easy-to-digest descriptions of this boson business. The celebrity analogy, for instance, was first concocted in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Miller submitted it as one of the winning entries to a challenge posed by UK Science Minister William Waldegrave: On one sheet of paper, explain what the Higgs boson is and why it’s important to find it. Though that analogy was a hit, other scientists wandered into the same mixed-metaphor trap as the journalists. Oliver Buchmueller, one of the senior physicists on the project, said the discovery was “very much a smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs.”