A brother at Sunni Forum is curious about current enthusiasm related to Higgs. Here is a very layman oriented first post on this issue by your poor Alig.
There are four type of forces and hence four type of interactions in nature.
You are familiar with electromagnetic force-the force between charged particles and the like.
You are familiar with gravitational force-the force responsible for falling of apples or the earth goind around the sun or the moon going around the earth.
Then there are strong and weak nuclear forces. Both of them acts inside the nucleus of atoms. Nucleus is very small. Hence both of them are called short range forces.
To describe the first one-the electromagnetic interactions you use electric and magnetic fields and the theory perfected by J.C.Maxwell around the time when Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband was being established. This has to be taken one step further to incorporate some thing called quantum mechanics. Leave it here for the time being.
The second interaction, the gravitational interaction in the simplest form is described by Newton's law of gravitation. This much is taught in High school itself. For a better description of the same we need Einstein's General theory of Relativity (GTR). This usually can be taught only at Post Graduate (PG) level. Leave this also-Higgs is some where else.
The weak and strong interaction that act at very small places can not at all be described in a way that Maxwell used for electromagnetic case and Einstein (Or Newton for simpler case) for gravitational case. In case of strong and weak interactions we necessarily need the thing mentioned earlier-quantum mechanics.
In fact we need a sophisticated version of quantum mechanics called quantum field theory. If you combine Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (this is not not the GTR mentioned above!) with quantum mechanics then you end up in quantum field theory. This is the technology that is used to understand weak and strong interactions. (We have to use the same thing for the best description of electromagnetic interactions also.)
So various things, difficult things, have to be mixed together to get there.
So suppose you want to understand weak interactions then in that quest you need this Higgs field. But I'll cover that story in a similar post if you are still with me.
Wassalam
