So what does it all mean? Here is how CERN describes the situation in its July 4 press release:
The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.
So, in other words we have now found about 96 percent of the universe. I guess that helps to fill the gap in our knowledge. London's The Guardian put it high on the list of scientific achievements:
The discovery of the Higgs particle ranks as one of the most important scientific advances of the past 100 years. It proves there is an invisible energy field that pervades the vacuum of the known universe. This field is thought to give mass to the smallest building blocks of matter, the quarks and electrons that make up atoms. Without the field, or something like it, there would be no planets, stars, or life as we know it.
The BBC covers the topic well in this documentary. The story adds some useful context to the topic.
Update: Slate magazine has a good analogy for explaining Higgs bosom:
Imagine a room full of
physicists. Suddenly Einstein enters and attempts to cross the room, but the
star-struck physicists cluster around him and impede his movements, effectively
increasing his mass. Now imagine that I enter the room. As a lowly
grad student, nobody wants to interact with me, so I pass through the
physicists relatively unimpeded—no effective mass for me! Lastly, imagine that
somebody whispers a rumor, causing the physicists to cluster together excitedly
on their own.
In this analogy, the room full
of physicists represents the Higgs field in space, Einstein represents a
particle with high mass, I represent a particle with low mass (or no mass), and
a cluster of physicists represents an excitation of the field, which is
effectively a Higgs boson.
