[LegitShady]

If the higgs field did not exist, particles would not have enough mass to attract each other, and the universe as we know it would not exist.

So while I do not know if there is some particular cause of the higgs field, no reality like ours would exist without it, and realities without it would not look like anything we recognize (although maybe scientists could simulate it).

[emblaegh]

Beware when mixing quantum field theory (Higgs) with gravity (attraction). We don’t have any idea how these two relate to each other.

[LegitShady]

the entire theory of the higgs field and its discovery came from understanding that the model without it lacked sufficient gravity to match the world around us.

So I understand what you're saying, I disagree that we don't know how these to relate to each other. The reason Peter Higgs theorized the higgs field is because we have some idea of it.Maybe it gets more complicated than we understand currently, but we understood it enough to guess some properties of the higgs boson and discover it experimentally.

[pdonis]

> the entire theory of the higgs field and its discovery came from understanding that the model without it lacked sufficient gravity to match the world around us.

No, it didn't. Mass is not required for gravity; only energy is. The energy was there before the electroweak phase transition; it just wasn't in the form of rest mass. It still produced gravity.

[LegitShady]

The end of the electroweak epoch is estimated at 10^-12 seconds after the big bang. So while I understand that something existed prior to the universe as we understand it now, for the overwhelming majority of the existence of reality we have lived in a reality after the electroweak phase transition, and the universe we live in today and the features we recognize of it are a result of forces including the effect of the higgs field on mass and thus gravity.

So you're right technically, but it has nothing to do with what I said in my first comment - without the higgs field the universe as we know it today would be unrecognizable, and a universe without a higgs field would not look like ours.

[pdonis]

> and thus gravity.

No. The electroweak phase transition had no effect on gravity whatever; the stress-energy that was governing the expansion was the same before and after. Again, the source of gravity in GR is the stress-energy tensor, not rest mass.

[leptons]

>Mass is not required for gravity; only energy is.

E = MC^2

Can't have energy without mass, and mass leads to gravity.

[elashri]

Actually it is

E^2 = (MC)^2 + (PC^2)^2

The first term is describing the rest mass. You can redefine the mass term to make it E=mc^2 but now this mass does not correspond to the rest mass. And for sure you can have energy without having a rest mass. Actually for the early universe all you had was a form of radiation and energy.

[itishappy]

The full equation is: E^2 = (p*c)^2 + (m0*c^2)^2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93momentum_relati...

[damiankennedy]

This ignores Planck's energy-frequency relation. Things like photons are affected by gravity as well.

[pdonis]

> E = MC^2

Is only an approximation for particular cases, not a general law.

[mr_toad]

> the model without it lacked sufficient gravity to match the world around us

True, but 99% of the rest mass of a Proton comes from the gluon field, not the Higgs mechanism. The universe wouldn’t fly apart without the Higgs field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics_binding...

[pdonis]

> If the higgs field did not exist, particles would not have enough mass to attract each other, and the universe as we know it would not exist.

This is not correct. Rest mass is not required for gravity. The source of gravity in GR is the stress-energy tensor, which was nonzero in the early universe even though all of the Standard Model fields were massless. Indeed, a vacuum electromagnetic field today has a nonzero stress-energy tensor even though, at the QFT level, it is a massless field (the photon).