The ‘Higgs boson’ and ‘Higgs field’ concepts are not easy to grasp. The Higgs field permeates all of space and behaves somewhat like the earth’s gravitational field.
When an object is raised, in the earth’s gravitational field, it gains what is termed ‘potential’ energy, a ‘hidden’ or ‘stored’ energy that can do mechanical damage if dropped. Likewise, when certain ‘elementary particles’ of the ‘Standard Model of Particle Physics’ traverse the Higgs field, it ‘interacts’ with (affects) them and they gain ‘mass,’ which is also a form of stored energy—E=mc2 (where ‘E’ stands for energy, ‘m’ stands for mass, and ‘c’ stands for the velocity of light in a vacuum). One may think of mass as ‘weight’ on earth.
According to the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—the European Council for Nuclear Research) website, https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/higgs-boson, “When the universe began, no particles had mass; they all sped around at the speed of light.” Wikipedia confirms this: “All fundamental particles … should be massless at very high energies [temperatures]”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson. So, in the early universe (i.e., at extremely high temperatures—during the first picosecond [10-12 of a second] of the Big Bang), before any interaction with the Higgs field, all fundamental particles are thought to have been massless and moving at the speed of light. As CERN explains further, “In our current description of Nature, every particle is a wave in a field. The most familiar example of this is light: light is simultaneously a wave in the electromagnetic field and a stream of particles called photons.”
[Note: In our universe, every physical entity exhibits itself ‘dually,’ that is, both as a ‘particle’ and as a ‘wave’—or oscillation. For example, light normally consists of waves, but it also behaves as a ‘quantum’ or a ‘packet’ of indivisible energy termed a photon. That’s why in photography dark rooms, red light, no matter how bright or for how long it is left on, does not develop a black-and-white (as well as the less-sensitive color) photographic film: it’s energy (E=hf, where ‘h’ is Planck’s constant and ‘f’ is the frequency) is insufficient to exceed a certain threshold because the red light frequency is too low. The physical phenomenon involved, in this particular case, is termed the photoelectric effect. In my article “Free Will and Predestination,” under “Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics),” I explain, in more detail, this duality of light.]
As the universe expanded and cooled down, several of these fundamental particles started interacting, to different extents, with the Higgs field: specifically, it interacts with particles that end up with a non-zero mass, including: ‘quarks’ (which form protons & neutrons), ‘leptons’ (particles like the electron & neutrino), and ‘W & Z bosons’ (which mediate the ‘weak nuclear force’ inside atoms). Indeed, the Higgs particle does not interact at all with massless particles, such as photons (like light) or gluons (which mediate the ‘strong nuclear force’ inside atoms).
Now, the Higgs boson is the ‘excitation’ of the Higgs field: somewhat like a drop of water forming inside steam. The Higgs boson is very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation—in about 1.6×10-22 of a second. The Higgs field uses the Higgs boson intermediately to interact with ‘non-zero-mass’ elementary particles giving them mass.
In https://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/inquiring/questions/higgs_boson.html, the Fermilab website, explains, “The Higgs boson is a particle. It gets its mass like all other particles: by interacting with (‘swimming in’) the Higgs field. But as you can imagine, the Higgs particle differs from all the other particles we know. It can be thought of a dense spot in the Higgs field, which can travel like any other particle: like a drop of water in water vapor. … The Higgs particle, like many other elementary particles, is not a stable particle. Since it interacts with all kinds of other massive particles it can be created in collisions. Once the Higgs particle has been created, it will eventually decay.” And according to CERN, “The Higgs boson can’t be ‘discovered’ by finding it somewhere but has to be created in a particle collision. Once created, it transforms—or ‘decays’ into other particles that can be detected in particle detectors.”
Technical Information:
The discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012, through the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland (on the Franco-Swiss border) provided strong evidence for the existence of the Higgs field and the mechanism it provides for ‘creating’ particle mass. As mentioned, the Higgs field interacts with and gives mass to many elementary sub-atomic particles. The ‘Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism’ explains how these particles acquire their mass through this interaction. The Higgs boson, when very rarely formed in the Large Hadron Collider (about once in a billion collisions, according to CERN), disintegrates into other ‘elementary particles’ in a small fraction (1.6×10-22) of a second. The formation of Higgs bosons is only evidence that a Higgs field really exists.
How certain are physicists that they discovered the Higgs boson since it only lasts for a fleeting moment before it decays and they can’t possibly examine it at their leisure? They’re not 100% sure, but they are better than 99.9999% sure. In the case of the Higgs boson, physicists passed the so-called threshold of ‘five-sigma.’ A 5-sigma result (or finding) signifies a very high level of statistical certainty: there’s a very small chance that the observed data is due to random fluctuations rather than a real phenomenon: specifically, a 5-sigma result indicates about a one-in-a-million chance that the findings are merely a statistical fluke. A 5-sigma certainty corresponds to a confidence level of approximately 99.99994%.
Despite Fermilab’s equating mass to drag: “The Higgs field … just causes a ‘drag’ = mass,” I must agree with Wikipedia’s stating, “Analogies based on the resistance of macroscopic objects moving through media (such as … objects moving through syrup or molasses) are commonly used but misleading, since the Higgs field does not actually resist particles, and the effect of mass is not caused by resistance.”
Consequently, I think we can best compare the Higgs field with the earth’s gravitational field (if we neglect air friction). All the initial ‘kinetic’ (motion) energy of a ball thrown upward is converted to ‘potential’ (stored) energy at its highest point. The ‘mass’ (otherwise known as ‘matter’) gained in a Higgs field is roughly comparable to the potential energy gained in the earth’s gravitational field when an object is raised. Wikipedia confirms this: “In Higgs-based theories, the property of ‘mass’ is a manifestation of potential energy transferred to fundamental particles when they interact (‘couple’) with the Higgs field.” There’s no question that, though massless, light photons do carry energy (E=hf=pc, where ‘p’ is the momentum, and ‘c’ is the velocity of light) from the sun to the earth.
Like the earth’s gravitational field, the Higgs field is a ‘scalar’ field. Unlike an electrical or magnetic field, the earth’s gravitational field is independent of direction: its ‘potential’ is only dependent on position above earth. The Higgs field, however, has a potential shaped like a ‘sombrero’ or ‘Mexican hat: it has a characteristic shape resembling a wide-brimmed hat. The ‘brim’ (valley) of the hat represents the stable, lowest energy state of the Higgs field, while the ‘top’ of the hat (around the center) is a higher energy state. When an elementary particle interacts with the Higgs field, it ‘overshoots’ the top and settles inside the brim.
Creation from Nothingness:
CERN asks, “Does [the Higgs boson] help to explain how the universe was formed?” The fact that the Higgs field (through the Higgs boson) gives mass to several subatomic particles (thus seemingly ‘creating’ matter) prompted popular media to nickname the Higgs boson as the ‘God Particle.’ Is the Higgs field or the Higgs boson the answer to creation ex nihilo (from ‘nothingness’)? Not really, for it begs the question: how did the Higgs field come about in the first place? Not to mention the prior existence of the massless elementary particles. These elementary particles, although massless (like photons that reach us from the sun) are not devoid of energy; and energy cannot be created or destroyed in our universe: it can only change form.
References
CERN: ‘Higgs Boson,’ https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/higgs-boson (‘Latest Related News’ update May 19, 2025)
Fermilab: ‘Higgs Boson,’ https://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/inquiring/questions/higgs_boson.html (last modified April 28, 2014).
Simple Wikipedia s.v. ‘Higgs Field’: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field (last changed March 29, 2025).
Wikipedia s.v. ‘Higgs Boson.’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson (last edited June 6, 2025).
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