Bosons are different. Bosons have the capacity to share space because they are more like a force than a thing in the way we normally think of "things" or "particles." And since the normal understanding of the word particle is that it's a small thing that has matter -- the mote in the sun, rather than the light itself -- perhaps a better way for lay people to think of bosons is as entities that have effects; they carry the forces (strong, weak, gravitational or electromagnetic) described by the Standard Model in physics, making them what physicists call force-carrying particles.

But if this whole particle-that-lacks-mass thing is still tripping you up, you don't need to use that word in your own head; bosons lose nothing for our purposes by being thought of as entities, even if they are still technically particles, which is to say something really small of which other things are made. Some bosons have mass and some don't. The Higgs boson has a very large mass for a sub-atomic particle, though of course it is still sub-atomic, which is to say tiny.

There are an array of different kinds of bosons, of which the Higgs boson is only the latest to be (tentatively) confirmed as existing. Here are some of the other kinds of bosons:

* Gluons. So named -- seriously -- because they help glue quarks together, mass-less gluons carry the strong force but operate only at close range, like glue, in that glue will stick two adjacent things together but not attract something from the other side of the room.

* W and Z bosons. W and Z bosons carry the weak force and operate at close range.

* Photons. Photons are mass-less wave-like particles that are the basic building blocks of light and carry the electromagnetic force.

(Gravitational force is hypothesized to be carried by the graviton boson, but that has not yet been proven. Gravity is still a bit of a mystery.)

OK, so now to the Higgs boson.

The newly discovered boson thought to be the Higgs boson was measured by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, which is a cathedral-sized underground mechanism for creating sub-atomic collisions that break things down into component parts. Part of why it's been hard to figure out from the news stories what the Higgs boson is is there are actually three Higgs things under discussion: 1) the Higgs field, 2) the Higgs boson and 3) the Higgs mechanism.

*The Higgs field is a quantum field that the Standard Model of physics predicts pervades the universe and creates drag on particles.

*The Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle that acts as the intermediary between the Higgs field and other particles. All fields are mediated by bosons, some of which pop into and out of existence depending on the state of the field, sort of like how rain drops emerge out of a cloud when it reaches a certain point. The electromagnetic field that pervades the universe, for example, is mediated by photons. Finding the Higgs boson would confirm that the Higgs field exists, and that field has long been postulated as a way of explaining an array of other physical phenomena.