Surely one of the most massive names in modern physics. RIP.
I’m so happy he lived to see the discovery of the particle and the confirmation of his theory
People will say his name for as long as our civilisation lasts. Like Volta, Ampere or Watt.
Albert Einstein, Immanuel Kant, Ron Jeremy, Mia Khalifa
…what were we doing again?
I thought we were about to break out into a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
I still have no clue what the Higg boson is or what it does. Something to do with gravity, probably?
No. There are two types of particles. Particles that go at light speed and particles that don’t.
The particles that don’t go at light speed don’t do this because they have rest mass. The particles that do go at light speed do so because they have no rest mass. They are massless.
Now what makes massless and massful particles different? This is where the Higgs Boson comes in. There is a field called the Higgs field, which is made by the Higgs Boson.
Particles that interact with the Higgs field are massful. Particles that don’t are massless. They thus can go at the speed of light.
For example, photons (that make light) do not interact with the Higgs Field. Hence, they go at light speed. Electrons however do interact with the Higgs field. They thus have rest mass. They thus do not go at light speed.
The Large Hadron Collider verified the existence of the Higgs boson. This is what the “god particle” stories were about in the past decade.
I think it also has something to do with mass creation which is probably just an even simpler version of what you’re saying.
Yes, that’s what the field does. When particles has certain properties then their interaction with this field effectively acts as a “dampener” and this effect creates what we describe as mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
I looked for a simpler but accurate description and found one above that matched my own intuition for it - the interaction with the Higgs fields restricts the particle wavelength, this directly restricts its propagation too and this is also what makes it travel slower than light. And by traveling slower than light while having energy / momentum it must also have mass. The section describing it is under the superconduction headline.
Having spent the last thirty minutes reading answers to this question from people way better at math than I am, I can confidently answer this question with:
Magic
Also particles aren’t real and neither is electromagnetism, anymore, apparently, so that’s fun.
https://youtu.be/yzqLHiA0uFI?si=kRW8VswcOuR3D7tE
In short, we don’t really have a good answer for this. The standard model is a very incomplete theory of quantum physics. There are MANY predictions that it either gets wrong or cannot explain.
So, if we can somehow manipulate the Higgs field or the Higgs boson, we can make something “massless” and travel at speed of light? Maybe even with zero time dilation since they have no mass to cause a gravitational field to slow down time?
While my understanding of quantum physics is better than the average high schooler, it is still very limited (I possess no mathematical understanding of the standard model whatsoever among many things). Hence, you can gauge the probability of the correctness of my answer. Considering this, here’s my answer:
We don’t know. We lack a lot of experimental data in quantum physics to answer this question.
- First, we have never observed a massless electron. Hence, we have no idea about what would happen if we could do as you said.
- Then, we have no experimentally proven theory of quantum gravity. We simply have no idea how gravity functions at the quantum level. Let’s say we make the rest mass of a massful particle zero by manipulating the Higgs field. What would happen to its gravitational mass? All of general relativity is based on the assumption that inertial mass = gravitational mass. This is called the principle of equivalence. However, we don’t know if this stays true at the quantum level. We don’t even know if the goddamn graviton exists or not.
So the answer is this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is like asking if we could manipulate the gravitational field to make ourselves weightless on earth. Both are fundamentally impossible
