Daniel Whiteson

And it's another example of math leading us to discoveries because it turns out it is real.

It is how the universe keeps the photon from getting mass and getting the W and the Z to have mass.

And that's incredible because it tells you that there's real mathematics at the heart of the universe where it supports that argument.

I could also make the other argument.

We're going to talk about it.

Yeah.

What is the Higgs boson in the end?

It's the thing that tells you that the particles we see are not the universe's fundamental particles.

When you look at an electron, when we measure an electron in the lab,

What are we interacting with?

What are we measuring?

It's not just a pure electron.

It's an electron bound up with Higgs bosons.

Okay.

Because an electron just moving through the universe would have no mass and would move at light speed, just like a photon does.

But in a universe with a Higgs boson in it, it can't do that.

Every step along the way, there's a Higgs field that's interacting with that electron.

It's like you trying to walk through a crowd of people and they're all like, AJ, AJ, AJ, AJ, stop talking to me.

The same way we say that photons, when they move through a material, don't move at the speed of light.

It's a little bit of a sleight of hand because there's no time at which there's a photon moving slower than the speed of light.