What is the Higgs?

(Sorry for ranting instead of explaining, but I do not have much time at the moment.)

I really hate this molasses explanation of the Higgs field. The problem is, it is wrong, suggests a wrong intuition and obstructs actually interesting physics. It is wrong, because the mass is something very different from friction. It suggests a wrong intuition, because the snow field, or the molasses, generates a force when something is moving through the medium. But there is no medium to move through. ( And mass acts, when there is a change of velocity, friction if there is velocity.) And the last point, the Higgs mechanism is a mathematical manipulation, which gets a term into the equations, that looks exactly like a mass term would. ( But without breaking electro weak symmetry.) There is really a lot of interesting physics going on here. The most fundamental question is probably, what is the relation between reality and physical models. If in one model the Z boson is massive, and in a equivalent model the Z boson is massless, but both models agree on every quantitative prediction. In which sense can we say that the Z boson is massive?

The best explanation of the Higgs mechanism I've seen so far has been from "minute physics":

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh5mTxRQcg

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASRpIym_jFM

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6guXMfg88Z8

(If you only watch one part, watch part 2, it's only 170 seconds long.)

I agree. I hate the molasses explanation, because it suggests the wrong kind of equations. Higgs bosons don’t dissipate energy. Repeat after me: “The Higgs mechanism is totally unrelated to viscosity or friction”

I think that the “added mass” can be a better analogy (A ball moving inside water drags part of the water, so to accelerate the ball you must accelerate part of the surrounding water, so the apparent mass is greater then the mass of the sphere. This is unrelated to viscosity. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Added_mass). But most people don’t have a good intuition about this effect, and I’m not sure that the analogies can be extrapolated to the correct equations.

The main problem is that Higgs bosons are extremely difficult to explain. I tried a few times to explain the Higgs bosons to “normal” people (like someone with only a Math mayor and no advanced Physics knowledge). I tried to explain it without equations, in a 10 minutes coffee talk. By the time I could explain the “Higgs field vacuum expectation value” and how it produces something that looks like a mass the people usually are totally bored and lost the thread of the explanation :(. I never could reach the part of the explanation about how the “Higgs bosons” appear in the Higgs field :( :(.

... did you just say that the thing that gives particles mass acts as though it's taking a massless particle and adding mass?

I am actually not sure what a good explanation would be. The problem is to a large part, that the particle explanation for high energy physics offers no good analogy. ( You will often hear that a photon is exchanged between interacting particles, with the implicit understanding that a photon is something like a billiard ball.) But perhaps I can at least describe the problem better.

The way physicists currently construct theories is based on mathematical symmetries. And in particular the theory of the electro weak interaction is build on a symmetry between the electro magnetic force and the weak force. So this gives the prediction that the weak force should be similar to the electro magnetic force, especially that it should have infinite range. But the experimental observation is, that the weak force acts only on very small distances, usually less than a femto meter.

The solve this problem, Peter Higgs noted that the symmetry between electromagnetism and the weak force should exist in the lofty world of mathematics, while in the messy real world the symmetry is broken somehow. So he invented a additional field, which breaks the symmetry. This is somewhat similar to the claim, that a car can go in any direction (the symmetry), but in realistic situations all cars follow the same road. So the road breaks the symmetry, without taking anything away from the ability of the car to go in any direction.

In quantum field theories forces correspond to particles. And the particles associated with the weak force, W and Z bosons, should therefore be similar to photons, the particles associated with electro magnetism. But a force that acts only on small distances means that the field quanta are massive, unlike photons which are massless. So in this view, the Higgs mechanism adds mass to the W and Z bosons, but does not add mass to the photons. But a better explanation would probably be, that the Higgs field limits the range of the electro weak force to the experimentally observed short distances.