As the Higgs boson "God Particle" is on the verge of being "seen" by the Large Hardon Collider ... we may need to adjust some earlier theories:

2. The symmetry-breaking vacuum was a sea of radiation without any internal structure; and electromagnetic interactions and light were previously mixed with the other electroweak gauge bosons. And the other condensate of the Higgs field moved into the sea of radiation.

3. And the Higgs field had the quantum numbers to preserve the unbroken symmetry of light; and light particles remained light and probably massless.

4. And the Higgs field was able to interact with light (via virtual loops of W-bosons and top quarks), i.e. to 'see' it, and the vanishing tree-level interactions guaranteed that the quantum number sourcing the interactions via the exchange of virtual light particles was a good quantum number (called the electric charge).

5. The introduction of the condensate to the Higgs field divided the gauge bosons into massless and massive ones. The Higgs vev included light to the first category; and the term Z-bosons was adopted for the massive part that isn't light. The Z-bosons, separated from light, were not protected against mass corrections, and therefore became massive. Because they are electrically neutral, they remained dark, at least at the tree level. The first period of the massive gauge boson's oscillation ended.

6. And the Higgs field generated positive fermion masses. Due to the Pauli exclusion principle, fermions are impenetrable and firm and they may separate regions occupied by unlimited amounts of bosons.

7. And the Higgs field generated the massive fermions, and divided the upper components of the fermion doublets (such as charged leptons and top-type quarks) from the lower components (neutrinos and down-type quarks) whose third component of the weak isospin was beneath zero: and the previous symmetry mixing both components of the doublet was suddenly broken: and it was so.

8. And the Higgs boson gave rise to the charged leptons and the neutrinos; and quarks. Many of them could have been born because the fields associated with them were subject to second quantization.

Apologies to those whose religious beliefs have been desecrated. 

Any blame must go to Lubos Motl

Happy Christmas! 

~lenny

Or, in layman's terms, Higgs "explains" why the standard model illustrated below has just these particles and why they have seemingly random masses (the number of MeV and GeVs you can see in each box). Thus the strong, weak and electromagnetic fields are all explained in a consistent model. So the only thing missing is an explanation of gravity.