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First, a little background. The Standard Model, developed in the early 1970s, is a theory that explains “three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles which make up all matter.” The fourth is gravity, so the Standard Model is definitely not a Theory of Everything, but it does tie together much of what we know about the universe.
Unfortunately, the theoretical Higgs boson is really, really small–too small for existing particle colliders to find, which is one of the many reasons (not the only reason, as this Slate article implies) that the Large Hadron Collider is being constructed in Switzerland. For further information on the LHC, the search for the Higgs boson, and some awesome pictures, I recommend these recent articles from the New Yorker and the New York Times.
