Question: What is the Higgs Boson?

Iain Bethune answered on 24 Jun 2015:

Bear in mind I’m not a particle physicist, but the idea is that the fundamental forces of nature have both a field which describes how that force varies throughout space, and a particles, which mediates interactions related to the force. In the case of the Higgs field, this is what gives all the other particles in the universe mass – the mass we observe is the result of how strongly any particle interacts with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson is the corresponding particle to the field. The fact that it is a boson just means that it has an integer spin (this is a highly technical property of particles that appears in Quantum Mechanics). Hope that helps to explain in – there’s really no simple answer I’m afraid…