"The key fact about the Higgs boson is that it is the origin of the masses of all known massive elementary particles, including the quarks, leptons, and W and Z bosons. That raises the following question: Why is a new particle needed to give other particles mass? An audience of physicists can understand the answer: Detailed experiments on the weak interactions establish that the Hamiltonian governing elementary particles has exact symmetries that forbid quark, lepton, and boson mass terms. Thus those symmetries must be spontaneously broken. That, in turn, requires a new field to provide the order parameter for the symmetry breaking. Those familiar with contemporary physics will recognize each step in the above argument. But for nonscientists, every step brings in new, technical, and difficult concepts. It is an unsolved problem to present this argument in popular language."