"So, what makes the Higgs boson so important?"

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/112798/encounters-with-the-god-particle?all=1

Encounters With the God Particle

The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science

By Paul Fishbane|September 27, 2012 7:00 AM

"So, what makes the Higgs boson so important? The Higgs mechanism was put forward in the 1960s as a way to allow symmetry in the underlying structure of a theory while the physical manifestation of the theory did not exhibit such symmetry. Physicists were coming to realize that symmetries play a central role in physical law—a realization that had taken root over 50 years earlier. Then, in 1967, a group of theorists found a way to use the Higgs mechanism to unify two previously separate domains of subatomic forces, electromagnetism and the so-called weak interactions. (The latter were responsible for some radioactive decays.) This “electroweak unification” fit the set of rules I wrote above with one particularly grave set of exceptions: When you tried to calculate with them, you apparently came up with meaningless numbers, infinities. But by the early 1970s other workers had learned that the apparent infinities were only apparent. In fact when you were careful to calculate more completely and look at only physically measurable quantities, the infinities would systematically cancel out."