According to the standard model, neutrons decay when massive particles pop out of an invisible field to change them, but where did their mass come from? It had to come from somewhere, so the answer was, of course, another field! The standard model needed a Higgs field to provide mass for the virtual particles it had invented to explain its weak force. The whole model was at stake, so the search for a Higgs particle became the holy grail of physics. It attracted over 30 billion dollars in funding and finally in 2012, after a fifty-year search, CERN found a resonance in the right range to support its possible existence. Physicists all over the world breathed a sigh of relief, and some called it the God particle, perhaps because it answered their prayers. Finding a million, million, million, millionth of a second 125 GeV signal meant the standard model lived on! Yet the proposed Higgs particle:
1. Doesn’t explain mass. The Higgs particle doesn’t explain anything about the mass around us, nor does it add any value to general relativity, which is our best theory of mass to date, nor does it explain the dark energy and dark matter that is most of our universe. It only explains the mass of virtual particles that no-one has ever seen, in order to rescue the standard model:
“… the Higgs field allows us to reconcile … how … weak interactions work, that’s a far cry from explaining the origin of mass or why the different masses have the values they do.” (Wilczek,2008) p202
The Higgs isn’t about mass in general, just the mass invented by the standard model.
2. Is medieval logic. If the Higgs particle creates mass, what gives it mass? If another Higgs, what gives it mass, and so on? A Higgs particle that begets itself is indeed a God particle! Some say the field itself creates mass, but what then does the Higgs boson do? Weren’t bosons invented to avoid invisible fields causing visible effects in the first place? This logic, that like has to create like, was the medieval fallacy that what creates water has to be like water, but science debunked that by creating water from hydrogen and oxygen gases that aren’t watery at all. The idea that mass has to come from other mass is the same medieval logic that led nowhere in the past.
3. Is impossible by quantum theory. In a carefully crafted press release, CERN claimed that zero-spin would confirm the Higgs, then found it so, but quantum theory doesn’t allow a spin-zero point particle to have mass (Comay,2009). All quantum particles with mass have half spin, and only matter-antimatter mixes like mesons have zero spin. This suggests that the resonance CERN found came from a top or anti-top meson.
The Higgs is medieval logic, not based on quantum theory, that adds no value to our understanding of ordinary matter. That physics now calls it the origin of mass is a tribute to marketing not science. The irony is that a theory based on matter particles leads to the strange conclusion that mass is more virtual than physical:
“The Higgs mechanism is often said to account for the origins of mass in the visible universe. This statement, however, is incorrect. The mass of quarks accounts for only 2 percent of the mass of the proton and the neutron, respectively. The other 98 percent, we think, arises largely from the actions of gluons. But how gluons help to generate proton and neutron mass is not evident, because they themselves are massless.” (Et,Ulrich,& Venugopalan, 2015)
Nearly all the mass of an atom comes from its nucleus, but only 2% of the mass of protons and neutrons comes from their quark constituents, so virtual gluons are said to create the other 98%. The standard model therefore attributes most of the mass around us to massless virtual particles!
The Higgs is a virtual agent that was invented to explain another virtual agent that was invented to explain an observed effect, namely neutron decay. A model that uses one invisible thing to explain another becomes a theoretical house of cards, so it is no surprise that this so-called God particle hasn’t led to a single other discovery or benefit.