Why does higgs boson explain mass

And here's where it gets really weird. If you added up the masses of the three quarks that comprise each proton or neutron, you would only end up with around 1 percent of the total mass.

That's right. The total mass of all the fundamental parts of you electrons and quarks is just a laughably tiny part of your weight. Instead, most of the blame for tipping the scales is the energy of the interactions between your parts.

Those gluons holding the protons and neutrons together are massless, but the very fact that they're doing their job — that is, gluing — gives rise to a binding energy. Hence, most of your mass is really the binding energy of your protons and neutrons. And none of that has anything to do with the Higgs boson. But the impressive-sounding statements about the fundamental connection between the Higgs and mass aren't all subatomic smoke and mirrors.

The Higgs does play a small role here: It's the explanation for the mass of your parts, the electrons and quarks themselves. Even though they aren't very heavy, they're not entirely massless, and they can thank the Higgs for that.

And the nature of that mass-making interaction? Often, the Higgs field is likened to a rich and creamy soup, or maybe a dense and heavy fog, or even a vat of thick and goopy honey.

Whatever the poor choice of metaphorical words, the analogy is clear: the Higgs field permeates the cosmos, impeding the free travel of carefree electrons and quarks. Quantum field theory tells us that this hypothetical region is not really empty: particle—antiparticle pairs associated with different quantum fields pop into existence briefly before annihilating, transforming into energy. The Higgs field on the other hand has a really high vacuum expectation value.

When the universe had just come into being and was extremely hot, its energy density was higher than the energy associated with the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field. As a result, the symmetries of the Standard Model could hold, allowing particles such as the W and Z to be massless.

As the universe started to cool down, the energy density dropped, until — fractions of a second after the Big Bang — it fell below that of the Higgs field. This resulted in the symmetries being broken and certain particles gained mass. The other property of the Higgs field is what makes it impossible to observe directly. Quantum fields, both observed and hypothesised, come in different varieties. Vector fields are like the wind: they have both magnitude and direction. Consequently, vector bosons have an intrinsic angular momentum that physicists call quantum spin.

Scalar fields have only magnitude and no direction, like temperature, and scalar bosons have no quantum spin. Before we had only ever observed vector fields at the quantum level, such as the electromagnetic field. Scientists had only one option to prove it exists: create — and observe — the Higgs boson. The energy of this interaction between quarks and gluons is what gives protons and neutrons their mass.

That makes mass a secret storage facility for energy. A proton is made of two up quarks and a down quark; a neutron is made of two down quarks and an up quark. Their similar composition makes the mass they acquire from the strong force nearly identical. However, neutrons are slightly more massive than protons—and this difference is crucial. The process of neutrons decaying into protons promotes chemistry, and thus, biology.

If protons were heavier, they would instead decay into neutrons, and the universe as we know it would not exist. This is why the tiny difference between proton and neutron mass exists. There may be an exception: neutrinos. Neutrinos are in a class by themselves; they have extremely tiny masses a million times smaller than the electron, the second lightest particle , are electrically neutral and rarely interact with matter.

But unlike football fields, the fields of physics are three-dimensional, and extend infinitely in all directions. One such field is the electromagnetic EM field — the kind you can feel near the poles of a red and silver bar magnet , but which actually exists everywhere all the time.

Each particle interacts with the EM field in a way that depends on its electric charge. For example, electrons, whose charge is -1, tend to move through the field toward the positive ends of bar magnets, and to clump together with positively charged protons. Like a sports field with its corresponding ball, each field of physics has a corresponding particle.

The EM field, for example, is associated with the photon, or particle of light. This correspondence plays out in two ways: First, when the EM field is "excited," meaning its energy is flared up in a certain spot, that flare-up is, itself, a photon.