If the Higgs Boson Is Found I'll.....
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Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Informative)
You start off sounding very authoritative and then just kind of trail off into complete ignorance ...
The lighter particles are not "made out of" Higgs Bosons.
The Higgs Boson is the mediation particle for the Higgs field; it's the field that gives rest mass to quarks, not the boson itself (in the same way, photons don't make things electrically charged). The point is, the Higgs field equation turns into something in the Hamiltonian that looks exactly like a rest mass term, so we can say that the particles don't have that rest mass term intrinsically, but that it comes from the Higgs field interactions.
All this is easily gleaned from Wikipedia.
Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Informative)
The Higgs Boson is one of the most heavy particles in the standard model. So there is no way the mass of the lighter particles can be made out of Higgs Bosons.
Well, at least I do know the answer to that one. Mass is acquired when particles perturb the Higgs field as they move-- it's not that the "lighter particles are made out of Higgs bosons."
It's the details of exactly how this explains mass that is unclear. (and, which mass is explained?).
--(for what it's worth, though, in quantum mechanics lighter particles actually can be made out of heavier particles bound together, since binding particles together releases energy, and that energy is of course mass.)
Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a pretty good explanation:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/ [profmattstrassler.com]
In short (and by my potentially incomplete understanding), the theory explains mass as a sort of drag introduced by the Higgs field. This serves to link mass and energy, explaining where rest mass comes from and why mass increases at relativistic velocities (higher drag). This is handy because we've 'known' for a while that mass is an artifact of energy but had no real explanation as to how/why. As far as "explaining mass", however, it does almost nothing: It replaces 'why does this have mass x' with 'why does this have y interaction with the Higgs field'. So indeed I'd not personally consider it as an "explanation for the origin of mass", but it is a step in the right direction (well, supposing it is right!).
Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Informative)
Its been a while, but the rest mass is the important part for making particles travel less than the speed of light. Light itself has kinetic mass for example, and yet it still travels at the speed of light.
Kinetic mass also has the property that it changes depending on your frame of reference. If you manage to push yourself up to the speed of light (so that you're traveling right along side some specific photon,) then you would measure that photon's mass as zero. A proton on the other hand would have a non-zero mass (its rest mass.) The Higgs mechanism is an explanation for why that non-zero mass exists.
One of Leonard Susskind's lectures goes into detail as to exactly what happens here, but its been a year or so since I watched those and I can't recall much details by now. All I really remember is that the Higgs is a scalar field and that there's some kind of pseudo-motion at the bottom of a Mexican hat function. The energy of the cross-motion (up and down the sides) interacts with real matter in some fashion giving rise to the observed rest masses. Or something like that! Might want to go watch the videos yourself in case my memory is more off-base than I think it is ;).
Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Informative)
Err.. quick link to Dr. Susskind's lectures [youtube.com] on Stanford's Youtube channel for anyone who's interested.
Re:Dose of reality (Score:5, Informative)
Are you a teacher? I hope not because you successfully destroyed this child's imagination.
I'm a physicist. If you cannot handle having your imagination compared to reality to see whether something is possible, and if so how, then I pity you because, without this simple step, you will never be able to turn any of your dreams into reality.