The Higgs boson is a wave, ripple or disturbance in an invisible, all-permeating field called the Higgs field. In the year 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert and four other scientists proposed a rather unique idea to explain why certain particles had mass. They hypothesized that the entire universe is filled with an invisible, all-permeating field that gives mass to all elementary particles. The field in question is called the Higgs field. A wave, ripple or disturbance in that field is therefore called the Higgs boson, or the Higgs particle. This theory suggests that particles do not have a mass of their own; rather, they get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. How heavy a particle is will be determined by how strongly a particle interacts with the Higgs field. Electrons, quarks and other elementary particles interact with the Higgs field in different ways and therefore have different masses. Photons, however, don’t interact with the field, and thus have no mass. #higgs
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