system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What have been the implications/significance of finding the Higgs Boson particle?

There was so much hype about the "god particle" a few years ago.  What have been the results of the find?
gpt
The particle itself was never of any particular relevance, except for potential weeding out potential grand-unified theories.  The importance of the discovery of the boson was that it confirmed that the Higgs FIELD was there, which was the important thing.  For about the last 50 years, particle physics has constructed itself upon the un-verified assumption that there must be a Higgs field.  However, you can't experimentally probe an empty field, so to prove it exists you must give it a sufficiently powerful "smack" to create an excitation of it (a particle).  

So the boson itself was pretty meaningless (after all, it was at a pretty stupid high energy). But it confirmed the existance of the Higgs field and thus provided a "sanity check" for 50 years of un-verified assumption.

Which for particle physicists was something of a bittersweet sigh of relief.  Bitter because it's written into the very mathematical fabric of the Standard Model that it must fail at SOME energy, and having the Higgs boson discovery falling nicely WITHIN the Standard Model means that they haven't seemingly learned anything new about that high energy limit. Sweet because, well, they've been out on an un-verified limb for a while and verification is nice.