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To: Flashlight; VadeRetro
Flashlight: The article says, "Without the Higgs, all fundamental particles would be massless, etc..." So, apparently the Higgs does exist.

VadeRetro: Higgs boson, which creates mass,

A point of clarification. The Higgs particle is thought to generate the masses of the fundamental particles of matter: the quarks and the leptons. There are other mechanisms by which mass is generated, however. For example, the masses of the protons and neutrons are much larger than the sum of the masses of the constituent quarks, so most of the "baryonic" mass density of the universe comes from mechanisms other than the Higgs mechanism. (The main focus of the intensely computational field of "Lattice QCD" has traditionally been to calculate the proton mass straight from the equations of quantum chromodynamics.)

13 posted on 08/17/2002 10:12:17 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
That helps clear things up, but I'm still wondering:

You have an electron flying along in a particle accelerator. Its mass, it being a lepton, comes from the Higgs boson. Why can't we see this directly?

14 posted on 08/17/2002 10:17:42 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: Physicist
Is there an "Anti-Higgs" with negative mass?
21 posted on 08/18/2002 12:08:14 AM PDT by Don Joe
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