I sounds to me as if the discovery of the Higgs boson means that ether is back. A hundred years ago, scientists believed that there was something that permeated the universe and served as a medium of transmission. They thought that light waves, for example, propagated through the ether. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment determining the speed of light, disproved that hypothesis. It found that the speed of light did not change with the movement of its source, unlike the propagation of sound waves through air, for example.
So there is not ether, but there appears to be a Higgs field. I'm not sure, but it appears that only Higgs bosons interact with the Higgs field. Thus, a photon, which has no mass, has no Higgs boson, and thus is not affected by, and does not interact with the Higgs field. Particles with mass, like protons and neutrons and the various sub-particles that have mass, such as quarks, would contain Higgs bosons and thus would interact with the Higgs field.
Presumable, everything with mass is attracted to every other thing with mass through gravity. Thus gravity would somehow seem to be connected to the Higgs field. Intuitively, it would seem that the interaction of gravity is instantaneous, unlike light. Thus, it might be that all of these interactions between masses through the Higgs field date back to the Big Bang and have been carried within that field as the universe expanded. Thus the Higgs field would carry information about every Higgs boson in the universe.
That idea may contradict some aspect of quantum theory, which says that you can't know everything about everything. I'm also not sure what it says about "dark matter," which would appear to contain Higgs bosons, since it has mass, although we can't see it. We can only detect its effects.
