Why the universe exists depends on a field you can't see
In short: Imagine a fish that has never known a world without water. To the fish, water isn't a substance; it is simply the medium of existence. Humans live in a similar invisible field that permeates the entire universe, providing the fundamental property of mass to the building blocks of matter.
In the mid-20th century, physicists developed the Standard Model to explain the building blocks of the universe. This model accounts for 12 fundamental particles of matter and 4 bosons responsible for the strong force, weak force, and electromagnetism. However, the model faced a major theoretical crisis: according to its underlying math, all force-carrying particles should be massless. While the photon is indeed massless, experiments proved that the bosons of the weak force do possess mass, creating a glaring inconsistency in the theory.
In 1964, a group of scientists, including Peter Higgs, proposed a solution. They hypothesized that particles are not inherently massive but instead gain mass by interacting with an energy field that pervades all of space. This became known as the Higgs field. The Higgs boson is the particle associated with this field. Without this interaction, the universe as we know it could not exist because particles would lack the mass required to form stable structures.
The mechanism works through varying degrees of interaction. Think of a pointed fish moving through water with low resistance versus a block moving through it with high resistance. Subatomic particles behave similarly; those that interact more intensely with the Higgs field acquire greater mass. This interaction specifically allows the weak force bosons to become massive, which in turn limits their range to a very small distance. The existence of the Higgs boson was finally confirmed in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider.
Because the Higgs field is so fundamental to the existence of matter, journalists sensationally dubbed the Higgs boson the 'God Particle.' It represents the universal medium that breaks certain symmetry laws of the electroweak interaction, effectively giving the universe its physical substance.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: The Higgs boson and Higgs field explained with Simple Analogy
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