Number 148 (Story #2), October 19, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein WHAT IS THE HIGGS BOSON AND WHY DO WE WANT TO FIND IT? Britain's science minister, William Waldegrave, posed this question---no small matter for a man who must oversee particle-physics expenditures of tens of millions of pounds---in the form of a contest. He proposed to give a bottle of champagne to the best single-page explanations. The five winning entries employed colorful metaphors, comparing, for example, the Higgs field to a room crowded with political party workers who, when Margaret Thatcher enters the room, gather around her, slowing her progress through the room and enhancing her "effective mass." Another article compares the Higgs field to the grain in a plank of wood, detectable only when you move against the grain. (The five brief articles are printed in the Sept. 1993 issue of Physics World.)