What is mass: Q&A

Q: It takes trillions of collisions to produce a few Higgs bosons, and they decay very quickly. However, if this boson is supposed to give things their mass, shouldn't there be an abundant supply of Higgs bosons around us? This seems contradictory to me. In other words, if they are not around us constantly, what …

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The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

Forewords The hunt officially started on Oct 19th, 1964 when Peter Higgs published a paper called "Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons" on Physical Review Letters (Vol 13, No. 16). Nowadays, his brilliant explanation about the origin of the mass of elementary particles is being tested in two laboratories: at Fermilab, 80 miles …