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Asked by emilylane to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 19 Jun 2013.
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Kate Husband answered on 19 Jun 2013:
That’s actually quite a tricky thing to answer and I don’t think anyone can fully answer it. The current idea is that some particles interact with a mass field (the Higgs field) and so have mass and some don’t, similarly to the way a charged particle interacts with an electric field and an uncharged one doesn’t. A way to prove if this idea is right is to find a Higgs boson, which is one of the things CERN is trying to find (they possibly have already found it – they have seen something they now need to check it is what they think it is).
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Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Well, the official word for it is “spontaneous symmetry breaking” (I know, try saying that 5 times fast).
But basically it works in this way…
Imagine you are going skiing on a field of fresh powdery snow. You strap on your skis, which are really thin, and you zip really fast down the slope. This is because your skis don’t really interact much with the snowfield.
I prefer snowboarding, but my snowboard is bigger and interacts a bit more with the snowfield as I ride, so I don’t go as fast as you do.
Finally, some poor guy lost his skis and has to walk down through the snowfield. He sinks in deep, and interacts a lot with the snow, so he has a really slow time of it.
Finally a bird flies past faster than all of us because it’s not touching the snow at all.
To someone watching the 3 of us, it would look like you are really light (have little mass), I am heavier (medium mass) and the lost ski guy was really massive. And the bird has no mass at all.
So – the more you interact with the snowfield, the more mass you have!
We have a type of snowfield like that that fills up the entire universe – we call it the Higgs field. And the more that particles interact with the Higgs field, the more massive they are. Those that don’t interact at all (like photons) have no mass!
Now, just like a snowfield is made up of particles called snowflakes, the Higgs field is made up of particles called Higgs bosons. We discovered a new particle last year that looks a lot like this guy! But we’re not 100% certain that it is THE Higgs boson. It certainly looks like A Higgs boson, but there could be more than 1 type of them.
So, there’s still work for us to do 🙂
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