Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I'm doing a Master's in condensed-matter physics and I don't understand much of the jargon.
What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.
The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).
All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.
On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.
I feel like the statistics going on here is almost as fascinating as the physics. Well, they technically are the same, but so intriguing to see people hooping and hollering at 5.0 sigma.
What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.
The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).
All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.
On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.