The Higgs Field
Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964, and its discovery at CERN in 2012 proved there is a field (the Higgs field) which gives quarks and electrons their mass. All fermions interact with this field, and their mass is manifested as they move through it. Other things, like photons and gluons, don't interact with it and are massless. However, the W and Z bosons do seem to respond to the Higgs field, and this is why the weak nuclear force is weak. But the fascinating thing is that this “mass” is actually only a few percent of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass we can measure and feel comes from the energy of these quarks and gluons churning in the Higgs field (converting energy into mass via E=mc2). Frank Wilczek called this “mass without mass”—mass emerging from the dynamics of nearly massless particles rather than being inherited from them. There are other consequences about the Higgs that go way above my head, such as vacuum having a non-zero rest energy, and how we are still to reconcile the expected value of this vacuum with the measured value. In any case, the Higgs marks the peak of our particular adventure—and possibly the end of it (at least as far as high energy particle physics goes). Stephen Weinberg famously said, before the Higgs boson was discovered, that finding it would be a sad day for particle physicists, because there is nothing else beyond it; no theory to guide us as to where to go next. Now that the standard model is complete, we can’t really point to the next destination in particle physics—and unfortunately it will be very hard to convince government agencies (or to galvanize a generation of scientists and engineers) to build the next multi-billion dollar accelerator. Perhaps the next Paul Dirac (or AI?) can guide us on where to go next, or perhaps the answer will, like it has happened before, fall from the sky. Either way, humanity should be proud of how far we’ve come, and humbled by how much we still don’t know.
Source: several
Image by Cern under CC BY-SA 3.0
Back to archive
Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!