I am a particle physicist. The most interesting point of this announcement for me is that this is a confirmation of predictions of a very exotic particle.
The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.
That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.
That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.
(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)
There will be time for popularization for the laymen. It is not now. It's more important that the knowledge be transmitted accurately and completely, than it is to give a reader's digest for the laymen. We'll have to wait until all of the discovered information is processed, and then summarized. Making a summary early on in the discovery is likely to contain errors. It's also better handled by people other than physicists working on the project.
The standard model predicted it and it was found. That's a major win for the standard model, which is the result of many years of theoretical work, as said above - it was able to predict something completely new, something that was never observed before.
I'm not deep enough in the field to see what questions could be answered, and we will see, but it's always a good thing to be able to rely on your model of the world.
So - this is not about other questions in the first place, it's about the validity of the standard model. We can continue from there.
(A common title for talks etc is "Physics beyond the Standard Model".)
I'm curious what you mean by "pretty much." Did the Standard Model predict 125 GeV?
I'm asking because I've seen a few casual descriptions of this Higgs as a "lightweight." I'm assuming that means it's not as heavy as expected?
EDIT: "If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV)."
This isn't exactly my field, but as I understand it a Higgs of 125GeV implies a supersymmetric model with relatively light squarks and no excitingly novel features. Basically, a small adjustment to the standard model that allows for one more family of heavy quarks and not much else.
The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.
That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.
That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.
(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)