What the Higgs Is Going on with Mass?

Simulation showing the production of the Higgs boson in the collision of two protons at

the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson quickly decays into four muons, which are a type of heavy electron that is not absorbed by the detector. The tracks of the muons are shown in yellow. Credit: Lucas Taylor/CMS Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State Universityand the chief scientist at COSI Science Center. Sutter is also host of Ask a Spaceman, RealSpace and COSI Science Now. I'm sure by now we've all heard the refrain: "The Higgs boson creates mass." And if you haven't heard it, well, now you have. This simple statement seems to pack a wallop of a concept: that every pound and gram of your body, down at the submicroscopic scale, is due to this invisible Higgs goo that fills up the universe. Hence the nickname "The God Particle," which has frustratingly entered the public consciousness. Without the Higgs, there wouldn't be mass. Without the Higgs, all the physics that we know and love would come screeching to a halt, particles flying off at the speed of light, hardly ever having the chance to interact.A massive problem The Higgs boson does indeed play a role in mass, but it's much less significant than you might think. Zooming in on you, we find that your body is made of organs, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and those electrons are incredibly wimpy — so insignificant that for most mass calculations they can simply be ignored. Digging into the atomic nucleus, we find protons and neutrons, the meat and potatoes of the atom. But they too are made of even-smaller components — the quarks. Each proton and neutron is composed of a triplet of quarks tightly bound together by gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force. And here's where it gets really weird. If you added up the masses of the three quarks that comprise each proton or neutron, you would only end up with around 1 percent of the total mass. That's right. The total mass of all the fundamental parts of you (electrons and quarks) is just a laughably tiny part of your weight. Instead, most of the blame for tipping the scales is the energy of the interactions between your parts. Those gluons holding the protons and neutrons together are massless, but the very fact that they're doing their job — that is, gluing — gives rise to a binding energy. It costs energy to rip apart a proton or neutron, and since we live in a universe where E=mc2, energy is mass (the c for the speed of light just tells us how much energy is in a bit of mass; the fundamental concept in that famous relation is that mass and energy are totally equivalent). Hence, most of your mass is really the binding energy of your protons and neutrons. And none of that has anything to do with the Higgs boson. The missing mass But the impressive-sounding statements about the fundamental connection between the Higgs and mass aren't all subatomic smoke and mirrors. The Higgs does play a (small) role here: It's the explanation for the mass of your parts, the electrons and quarks themselves. Even though they aren't very heavy, they're not entirely massless, and they can thank the Higgs for that. And the nature of that mass-making interaction? Often, the Higgs field is likened to a rich and creamy soup, or maybe a dense and heavy fog, or even a vat of thick and goopy honey. Whatever the poor choice of metaphorical words, the analogy is clear: the Higgs field permeates the cosmos, impeding the free travel of carefree electrons and quarks.[Watch: The Mystery of Mass]     https://www.livescience.com/59131-higgs-boson-mass-mystery.html