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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
IDK. It's not something a non-physicist will need to learn about. It'd be a challenge to describe the Higgs field in any non-hand-wavey manner to a 2nd year physics major. It's not something a non-physicist is going to understand in a comprehensive way other than to memorize some statements.
Even the layman's understanding of "Physicists have detected Higgs Bosons." is misleading, because we haven't had any detector register the presence of a Higgs Boson. We've observed the decay products of a particle with the properties hypothesized by Higgs, et al. If it has all the properties of the thing, it is that thing. So we've detected evidence of Higgs Bosons' decay, which implicitly confirms the existence of Higgs Bosons.
If our new understanding of Higgs bosons leads to a new unforeseen shift in technology, then his name will be remembered. Like Einstein's. If Einstein's relativity didn't tell us to look for Black Holes, or enable us to create big explosions, microwave ovens and GPS, then I doubt he'd be much remembered, either, like so many names of Nobel Prize recipients.
None of those things are relevant to him being remembered. It only needs to be a hand wavy explanation, it doesn't need to be a discovery in terms of here it is in a jar. He's remembered because this big thing that happened that was all over the news for years kept mentioning his name & his name will continue being mentioned in the future because he's pretty fundamental.
Now he's not like a Newton or Einstein where he is cemented in popular culture but he wouldn't be a pointless answer (tv reference I doubt you get).
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