Joining the Higgs Bozos Club

Matt Ridley on the great scientific breakthrough that, although splashed all over the news, nobody can really understand:

almost nobody, myself included, knows what a Higgs boson is, or at least can give a sensible description of it. This is a serious handicap if Higgsism, as I hereby christen it, is to have an impact on human culture, let alone on technology. Most scientific discoveries can be boiled down to a sound bite, however imperfectly. Black holes are so dense that they do not even let light out. Genes are pieces of heredity. Vaccination is a medical procedure that works by stimulating the body’s immune system. And so on. […] The Higgs boson feels untouchably esoteric, a fragment of pure knowledge that may never be applied in the practical world.

Even engineers I spoke to don’t understand what it is and why it’s important. As a physics enthusiast, that’s driving me nuts.