This means that there would be no atoms, and consequently nothing in the universe… no stars, no planets, no energy, no matter. There would be no heavy nucleus and therefore no electron bound to the nucleus. Those atoms have electrons revolving around a heavy nucleus.

Imagine the very atoms of which we are made. There is a reason why the Higgs boson is called the God particle. This is how the electroweak force was split into electromagnetic and weak forces. On the other hand, W and Z bosons were heavier marbles that interacted too much with the fabric of the Higgs field. Photons were like tiny marbles that never touched the Higgs field and hence never gained mass from it. Particles such as the W and Z boson interacted a lot with the Higgs boson and therefore had a large mass, whereas photons did not interact at all, making them the fastest particles in the universe and also massless. The more the particle interacted with the Higgs Boson, the more it slowed down that slowing down is what we know as the mass of the particles. Every particle interacting with the field gained mass. After the universe reached the threshold temperature for the Higgs field, the effects kicked in. Quickly, the universe began cooling down and expanding. The question is, where was the Higgs field during this time?īelieve it or not, the Higgs field was there since the beginning, but for it to come into action, the universe needed to cool down to a certain temperature (source).

This was when the electroweak force was intact and photons, W, and Z particles were massless. It was nothing but a densely packed sea of elementary particles that had no mass. The moment after The Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was extremely high. Therefore, when we are looking at the mass of the particles, know that the more massive ones are interacting a lot with the Higgs field, while the massless ones are not interacting with it at all. Only this time, it’s the other way around, i.e., the more a particle disturbs the Higgs field, the slower it travels and the more mass it gains. Just like a massive marble creates more disturbance in the fabric and thus travels slowly, the same goes for elementary particles. The larger the disturbance it creates, the more the speed of the particle is hindered. Therefore, when a particle interacts with the Higgs field or disturbs it in any way, it is interacting with Higgs boson, the particle. In short, any kind of disturbance in the Higgs field is what we know as the Higgs boson. Any kind of disturbance, which in this case is the shift in the fabric, is seen as the Higgs boson particle itself. We all know how a marble would shift the fabric and create a slight dent or shift in it. Now, let’s imagine a particle as a marble moving on this field. Any kind of disturbance in this field-a crease or a wave or a dent-will be the Higgs boson. Imagine a sheet of fabric as the Higgs field. They called this force field the ‘Higgs Field’ source. Physicists Robert Brout, François Englert, and Peter Higgs proposed that the mass must have come from another force that is also responsible for splitting the electroweak force. If they had the same origin, what made the two forces split, such that one gained mass and the other did not? On the other hand, W and Z bosons, the force carriers of weak force, had some of the highest masses in the model. However, this was quite strange, because a photon, which is a force-carrier of electromagnetic force, is massless. This meant that both forces had the same origin, which they named the electroweak force. Standard Model (Photo Credit : ShadeDesign/Shutterstock) But it was while working on this Standard Model, building quantum field theory for each force, that scientists realized something strange… Two of the fundamental forces, electromagnetic and weak, turned out to have the same quantum field theory.