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Does anyone here have a good understanding of what the higgs boson is supposed to be? If I understand correctly it is supposed to be the carrier of masss. At
by voodoomagicman 15y ago
Does anyone here have a good understanding of what the higgs boson is supposed to be?
If I understand correctly it is supposed to be the carrier of masss. At the same time its proposed mass is larger then the mass of a proton or electron. How can mass not be quantized to multiples of the value of a single higgs boson?
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThe Higgs isn't like some sort of "mass coin", particles don't have mass by containing one or more instances of a Higgs boson. Instead there is a Higgs field which individual particles couple to which gives rise to mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field the same way a photon is an excitation of the EM field, a graviton is an excitation of the gravitational field, etc.
- repsilat 15y agoA couple of quick clarifications: 90-99% of the mass in regular matter is due to strong force interactions. In things like protons, neutrons etc the Higgs is only responsible for a small amount. See [1] for a little more detail. As a quick aside, gravitons aren't quite kosher science yet. We haven't observed them, and we don't even have a coherent theory of how they would work. Something to do with equations being non-renormalizable, I don't claim to understand any of it. 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pd6wc/why_is_there_a_problem_with_the_weakness_of/c3oieh4 http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pd6wc/why_is_the...