system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is Higgs Boson "God" Particle in Layman's terms, or at least what did it provide to science?
gpt
The Standard Model, containing only the particles and interactions discovered before 2012 (electron, muon, tau leptons and neutrinos; up/down, charm/strange, top/bottom quarks; gluons; W/Z bosons; photon), is not a mathematically consistent theory if any of the particles have mass. (Experimentally, all of the particles do except the gluons and photon.) If you add in mass by hand, the theory breaks down at energies of about 1 TeV, just around the corner from our pre-LHC colliders. So, either something incredibly dramatic happens at 1 TeV (e.g. the Standard Model becomes something *completely different* around there), or else something new in the theory is required.

The simplest new thing that can explain particle masses *without* breaking down the theory is the *Higgs mechanism*, in which a new field (Higgs field) generates the masses of particles by interacting with them. (Instead of adding masses 'by hand' to the theory, they are generated spontaneously with the help of the Higgs field.) The Higgs field itself has mass but, because of the type of field it is (scalar, unlike any of the other fields/particles in the Standard Model) this *doesn't* cause the theory to break down. The Higgs boson is just a 'side effect' of the Higgs mechanism; it's the ripples in the Higgs field that correspond to particles. The details of the field and mass generation are quite mathematical, unfortunately.

Discovering the Higgs boson, simply put, completed the Standard Model. (The Higgs was already part of the Standard Model since it was written down in the 1970s, because it was already necessary for consistency then.) It was the most expected thing that could have happened, confirming decades of (very justified) assumptions about its existence.