Now, suppose you try to remove every bit of energy from a region of space. Suppose, in other words, you try to reduce that region to its state of lowest energy, which is known as its “vacuum state.” At a certain point in this energy-draining process, something very counterintuitive will occur. An entity that physicists call the “Higgs field” will spontaneously emerge. And this Higgs field cannot be got rid of, because its contribution to the total energy of the space you are trying to empty out is actually negative. The Higgs field is a “something” that contains less energy than a “nothing.”
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