1. The Universe is permeated by a field known as the Higgs Field. The Higgs Boson is the particle component of the field, the wavicle if you like.

2. What we perceive as the mass of a particle is in fact the interaction of the particle with the field as it moves through it. You can think of the interaction as a sort of friction whereby the particle has to drag some of the field along with it as it moves, which makes it look as if the particle has mass.

3. Different particles have different masses because of different interactions with the field.

4. The Higgs Field arose because of a phase transition, or spontaneous symmetry breaking, after the Big Bang.

5. To understand a phase transition, think of water spontaneously turning into ice as its temperature falls. After the Big Bang, the falling temperature forced the Higgs Field to adopt its characteristics.

6. Finding the Higgs Boson is required to understand the missing component of the Standard Model, i.e. the question of why particles have the mass they do and why there is a 14 orders of magnitude difference between the lightest and heaviest particles.

7. In order to detect the Higgs Boson you have to observe particle collisions of very high energies. Subatomic particles are not described by how "big" they are, but by how much mass they have, which translates into energy as per E=mc2. The unit of energy used is the electron volt.

8. The lower energy limit for the Higgs Boson has already been set by dint of the fact that accelerators working at current energy levels have not found it. The new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN should be able to detect the Higgs Boson if it exists.

9. If the Higgs Boson is not found, some physicists see that as a good thing, because although finding it will tell us how particles get their mass, it still won't tell us why particles have the exact amount of mass we observe: thus, we still will not understand the interactions between the Higgs Field and the particles fully.

10. As an alternative to the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson, there is another explanation of the mass problem called supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry does account for the amounts of mass we observe possessed by particles, and means that each particle - proton, neutron, quark, electron, whatever - has an invisible "partner", a sort of ghostly shadow particle. These partner particles, however, exist, in theory, at much higher energies than will be attainable by the LHC, and thus we cannot observe them directly. But if the Higgs Boson is not found, that could well mean that supersymmetry theory is correct. Unless, of course, something totally new and unexpected, not predicted by either Higgs' theory or supersymmetry theory, is detected by the LHC when it starts its observing later this year.