I like that one, too. But then I read the others and they seem to give a totally different picture, like: symmetric pencils falling in space. It is interesting to read how the different physicists visualize and explain this concept.
And with that comment I'd like to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y
Physicist Richard Feynman describes an experience where he and a fellow student visualized the elementary concept of counting in different ways... "What we're really doing is having some big translation scheme going on where we're translating what this fellow says into our images."
It’s important to remember that these are not the way that physicists think about the Higgs boson. This is the way they try to explain it without any equation, and not using the words like "Lie Group" or "Gauge invariant". The problem is that explain the Higgs bosons in an easy way is very difficult to. (It is like explaining one of the more obscure posts of Raymond Chen to someone that never had seen a computer.)
Last year I took a course about particle physics and we saw the equations of the standard model.
I like more the explanation that involves "pencils". I think that it is possible to expand the non-technical words and get something like the correct theory for Higgs bosons (for example: pencil->vector). In this explanation there are a lot of details missing of course, for example: Why the Z and W particles have different mass? How do the electrons get their mass? What is the difference between the waves that rotate the pencils and the waves that stretch the pencils? I think that these simplifications are sensible to get a short explanation.
I don’t like the explanation that uses viscous forces. The main problem is that with viscous forces the particles "lost" energy and the particles should become still. The real effect of the Higgs field is similar to the apparent effective mass of an object in a fluid. To accelerate the object it is necessary to accelerate some of the fluid that is around it, so it is more difficult and the object have a bigger apparent mass. This is unrelated to the viscosity and happens even when the fluid has no viscosity.
Another problem with this explanation is that the when the particles move they don’t drag any Higgs bosons (real or virtual). So the mental image is wrong. A possible way to see this is that as the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is not zero, the particles can "bounce" against the vacuum and the result is something in the movement equation that looks like a mass. It sounds strange or even ridiculous, but in the problem is not in the equations, but in the "translations" to non-technical words.
