source: CERN
To understand the Higgs mechanism, imagine that a room full of physicists chattering quietly is like space filled with the Higgs field ...
... a well-known scientist walks in, creating a disturbance as he moves across the room and attracting a cluster of admirers with each step ...
... this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field...
... if a rumor crosses the room, ...
... it creates the same kind of clustering, but this time among the scientists themselves. In this analogy, these clusters are the Higgs particles.