When does energy turn into matter?

[Laufen]

Yes, the Higgs boson is responsible for mass but you really have to understand the higgs field first. The most common analogy (and the one I use with my students) is like swimming in water. The higgs field is an energy field that is everywhere all the time and there are no holes in it, the same as if you were swimming in a super large tank of perfectly clear water. Some things, like photons (light), will not interact with the water at all (or only barely) and would be considered massless or near massless because they don't interact with the water (higgs field). Streamlined things like dolphins interact very little and would have very little mass (like an electron). other things, like a truck driving through the water would interact a lot and have a lot of mass (like a proton). So how much mass you have is a function of how much you interact with the higgs field.

And as water is made up of tiny particles called molecules, the higgs field is made up of tiny particles called bosons. There are different kinds of bosons, but these create the higgs field so are called higgs bosons.

Excellent! Thank you so much.

 

[renault314]

Ok so mass is just a product of a particles reaction with the Higgs field? Why was it so hard for us to confirm the existence of the Higgs-boson if the Higgs field is everywhere?

And are you a physics professor? You seem like you explain these things a lot.

"Why was it so hard for us to confirm the existence of the Higgs-boson if the Higgs field is everywhere?"
I don't think they've confirmed the higgs field. They just recently found the higgs boson, and that took thousands of scientists and engineers 20 years and 20 billion euros just to design and build a machine capable of finding the boson. And that machine was like the 4th or 5th try at it. its hard to build a machine capable of detecting and measuring something that cant be seen or felt, is everywhere but passes through everything and we don't even know if its real or not. Its like trying to build a machine to detect the soul. where would you even begin? and if you did build one but it didn't find anything, how would you know if your negative result was because of a bad design, or because it was never there in the first place?

Yeah, im a physics teacher. not a professor though.

 

[bambam]

Welcome to the Particle Zoo.