Anyway, without understanding Quantum mechanics and Field theory and the Standard model, it is hard to get any deeper than that and understanding those thing is really complex. So it’s hard to explain, but let’s dive into it. First, we should learn about Four fundamental forces. Electromagnetism is the most common force in our daily lives. It is also the thing that keeping your phone or pc stick to your hand right now. But there are also other forces, There is gravity and there are the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces.
The world has previously thought that these forces were continuously radiating fields that came out from the source of the force. But Quantum mechanics doesn’t allow for continuousness in that way. So what Scientists have realised is that it is not a field in the traditional way of understanding. It is actually a distribution of particles and the strength of any given field is actually the density of those particles at that point. For example, a magnet which we know has a force around it has a high density of these invisible particles called virtual particles snapping In and out of existence around it. The density of the particles is much higher near the magnet and drops off exponentially as you move away. These particles are very weird and wibbly and difficult to conceive of. But because they are constantly snapping in and out of existence they can’t exist in the way that normal matter does without violating the law of conservation of energy which says that things can’t just start existing. So they are not matters. But these virtual particles are actually particles.
The trick has been to coax them into existence so that we can study them. Because mass and energy are equivalent, given the right circumstances we can dump enough energy into a system to actually make these virtual particles real particles. We do this using particle accelerator and we have done it before. This is how we know that these force carriers particles actually exist. Physicists figures out that they probably should exist and then they created the circumstances necessary, dumped a bunch of energy in and then they did exist and we sad there! There it is!.
So those are the virtual particles that create forces like Electromagnetism. But mass doesn’t feel like a force in that way. Mass is just something that you have all the time. Why doesn’t there need to be something to explain that? The idea is that the universe is permitted with an even distribution of a force carrier particle for mass and that is called the Higgs field or the Higgs particles. So that is how according to the standard model we now understand forces.
The question is, Is mass a force in the traditional way? Physicists say that it is. Now, this might seems weird to you because mass just seems like a thing. It is a thing that you have. You have molecules and atoms and they have mass. But something doesn’t have mass. A photon doesn’t have mass. But it is very similar to an electron at an elementary level. So why does an electron have mass and a photon do not have mass?
So physicists have sort of agreed upon the idea that it is the Higgs field that gives particles mass and some particles interact with it and those do not. But instead of Electromagnetism which radiates from a point, mass doesn’t come from. A point source. Your mass would be the same anywhere in the universe. So Idea is that the Higgs field which is the field that gives things mass exist throughout the entire universe. The other way of saying this is that Higgs force carriers the virtual particles the Higgs boson exist at an even density throughout the entire universe. Particles without mass like photon don’t interact with Higgs force carriers and so they don’t have mass. And then there are other particles like the electron which interact weakly with the Higgs and thus are light and then the top pharmacy which is the heaviest particles that we know of. Interact very significantly with the Higgs field, so it has lost of mass. So that is the idea I hope that you get it.