Daniel Whiteson

It's an effective description.

We say light is moving through the material as if it was moving slower than the speed of light.

What's really happening is, you know, it's being absorbed and emitted and absorbed and emitted.

It's interacting with the material.

And so that changes effectively how a photon moves.

There's no scenario in which the photon is actually moving slower than the speed of light.

The same way an electron moving through the universe

it would move at light speed and have no mass, but it interacts with the Higgs boson.

And so we step back and we say, well, in a real electron, the thing we measure in the laboratory is this thing, this electron that's interacting with the Higgs.

It's an effective description.

And so like a pure electron is this theoretical thing we never see.

The real electron is actually this like buzzing interplay between two fields, the electron field and the Higgs field, which are very tightly coupled.

So that's why electrons that we measure have mass.

They don't really have mass in a pure sense, but the electron we interact with that we see in the laboratory that is used to build up me and you is this effective description, or what's really happening is there's an electron field and a Higgs field tightly bound together.

And so that explains why electrons have mass and why W's and Z's have mass.

And that's what was important about the Higgs boson.

But it's part of our model.

It's our explanation for what we see out there in the universe.

It's powerful because it describes future experiments.

It describes what we see.