Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ww520 642 days ago
That's why calling Higgs Boson the God particle is not quite right. It's the Higgs field that gives mass to the other particles, not the Boson. A Higgs Boson is just an excitation of the Higgs field; it doesn't give mass to other particles. In fact it's the Higgs field modifying the other fields causing their excitations (particles) to slow down when passing each other, thus gaining masses.
3 comments

Actually it doesn't seem to be that simple. Higgs Boson seems to contribute mainly to masses of leptons (mostly electrons) and bosons W and Z. And that influence goes to zero at high energies of the measures system making W and Z weightless and merging electrostatic and weak interactions into a singular electroweak interaction.

Quarks get most of their mass from QCD with very minor contribution from Higgs Boson. And nobody has any idea where the mass of neutrinos comes from.

It also has no influence on photons and gluons.

Higgs seems to be very peculiar and not very universal mechanism. I wonder if one of the potential future approaches won't do away with Highs Boson (together with virtual particles) as artifacts of specific math approach and interpretation without any physical manifestation.

Higgs was detected, sure, but it was detected through an interpretation of the data through the best available mathematical model which some postulate might contain some purely mathematical constructions along the way to the ultimate real world result.

it was in fact called the "Goddamn Particle" originally, referring to how difficult it was to detect it. The name was changed later to "God Particle" for publishing reasons.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/God_particle

The line between whimsy and intellectual negligence seems blurry, in this case… how many people have been tricked by bad-faith gurus using this?

Thanks for sharing, TIL and it’s fascinating.

So, its all gravity, if you turn the sock inside out? Just taking different colors and shapes?
It’s more like Higgs field gives mass to other particles whose masses warp spacetime that gives gravity.
What do you mean? How do you reach that conclusion? I wasn’t aware there was a connection with gravity
best way to reveal a TOE