“Our intuitions and imaginations, helpful as they are for working out human size problems like whether our neighbour is likely to cheat on his wife or how far away Geneva is from Inverness, are only useful in the middle world. In the very small world, or the very big one, those intuitions are likely to mislead and confuse us. When we find results that seem to make no sense, we should not be surprised or alarmed. ‘Sense’ only belongs to the middle world.”
“Imagine a field of snow, stretching out as far as you can see. Now imagine that you’re trying to cross that field. There are different ways to cross it. A skier could skim across it on skis, a walker could walk using snowshoes, or a trudger could trudge through in boots, sinking deeply into the field, the snow coming up to their thighs. The skier is like a particle with no mass – it doesn’t interact with the Scalar Field at all – and it travels very quickly. The snow-shoe walker is like a particle with mass – it interacts with the field and moves more slowly. And the trudger is like a particle with a big mass – it interacts with the field even more and moves very slowly. The field isn’t made out of snow, it’s made out of these Higgs Bosons, it stretches throughout the universe and the different interactions that different particles have with it determines their mass.”
“That was the theory, anyway. But until we actually found a Higgs Boson – a particle which had the right characteristics to perform the functions of a particle in this Scalar Field – it was just a hypothesis. And this, cautiously, with a few reservations, is what we seem to have done. Scientists at CERN have smashed together particles at extremely high speeds and have found a boson which looks like it’s the one.”