There's a very good book on quantum physics, published in 1978, by PCW Davies, called 'The Forces of Nature', which discusses most of this in nice detail. One

There's a very good book on quantum physics, published in 1978, by PCW Davies, called 'The Forces of Nature', which discusses most of this in nice detail. One gets the sense that not a whole lot of new physical theories have been confirmed since this book was published. For example, the renormalization problem: > 'Fortunately the problem of infinite self-energy can be overcome... Manipulating infinte quantities requires some mathematical care, but it can be proved that all <observable> quantities are finite. The technique, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, of absorbing infinities into unobservable 'bare' quantities to get a finite answer, is called renormalization. It may appear like a trick, and nobody pretends that it is completely satisfactory, but without renormalization the predictive power of quantum electrodynamics would disintegrate. With it, the answers obtained have the legendary accuracy already described.' According to this book, the problems with renormalization are much more severe with weak interactions: > 'The renormalizability of QED can be traced directly to the masslessness of the photon. Like all massless particles that spin, it can direct its spin either parallel or antiparallel to its direction of motion, but not in between as well. In contrast the massive W can align its spin in three different directions, for example, parallel, antiparallel and perpendicular to its motion. This seemingly innocuous property is the cause of all the difficulty, because it turns out it is the W particles with the perpendicular spin directions that prevent the infinities from being renormalized away." > "These observations suggest that if the W particle were massless, it might be possible to construct a unified renormalizable theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions in which the photon and W are combined, like the hadrons, into a single family." Notably there's no mention of the Higgs boson in this book, which is nevertheless remarkable in how it covers the background of almost every physics story I've come across for years. However, is this basically the entry point to why the Higgs boson is important? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction > "In the Standard Model, the W± and Z0 bosons, and the photon, are produced through the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak symmetry SU(2) × U(1)Y to U(1)em, effected by the Higgs mechanism (see also Higgs boson), an elaborate quantum field theoretic phenomenon that "spontaneously" alters the realization of the symmetry and rearranges degrees of freedom."