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I never understood how such an energetic particle (The Higgs Boson has 50 times more energy than an ultrafast neutron) can naturally regulate a field that perme

• jessriedel 5y ago
  In some sense that's the cosmological constant problem and it applies to all particles, not just the Higgs. If a field with zero excitations were to weigh something (more specifically, have a positive energy density) on the scale of its single-excitation mass, it would be larger than the observed energy density of the universe by dozens of orders of magnitude, even if you're just talking about the extremely light neutrinos. But in fact, zero excitations looks to weigh zero...or 10^-60 - 10^-120 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
• ajkjk 5y ago
  The particle is just what a quantization of the field looks like. Any particular interaction involves many minute probabilities of it existing. It's a lot like: two atoms can always exchange a low-energy photon, say, and move an electron between orbitals... but they could also exchange a _super high energy photon_ instead. It's just very highly unlikely. Nevertheless the fact that they can do that contributes to the physics, at least a little bit. But that virtual high energy photon (which shows up in the Feynman diagrams) isn't destroying anything either, for the same reason the Higgs isn't.