The short version of the story is that the Higgs is a kind of energy field that pervades all of space and has interactions with other particles in a way that allows them to have mass. The Higgs boson has the same relationship to the Higgs field that the photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force (and light), has to the electromagnetic field—it’s a localized “excitation” of something that pervades a larger space. The long version of the story has to do with electroweak theory, the theory that unites the weak nuclear force with electricity and magnetism, and how a process called
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