# Is this a good explanation of the Higgs mechanism? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Is there an accepted analogy/conceptual aid for the Higgs field?

A video I watched explains the Higgs mechanism as follows.

Take massless particles. These can only ever travel at the speed of light, but they can bounce off things. Now take a particle with mass. Imagine that it can also only travel at the speed of light, but it interacts with the (very dense) Higgs field all the time, by constantly bouncing back and forth off the field. Thus it appears to travel slower than the speed of light.

Would you say this is a reasonable explanation of the mechanism? Does the described process happen in any real sense, or is this one of those interpretations where we can't really pick one over the other because they are mathematically equivalent?

For example, if the particles were really travelling at the speed of light but constantly bouncing off the field, wouldn't GR predict that they would never decay as observed in any frame of reference?

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## marked as duplicate by Qmechanic♦, Manishearth♦Dec 11 '12 at 12:02

Hm, the video raised another question in me, namely why do massless particles have to travel at the speed of light by default, but maybe that’s a separate question? –  Timwi Oct 9 '12 at 17:39
Possible duplicate: physics.stackexchange.com/q/6450/2451 –  Qmechanic Oct 9 '12 at 18:07

The key point is that an electron is not a particle. In Quantum Field Theory it's described as an excitation in the electron quantum field. This excitation will propagate in spacetime, and from the way it propagates e.g. the propagation velocity and how much momentum it carries, we can calculate it's mass. And in fact if the electron field has no interaction with the Higgs field the propagation speed would be $c$ so the electron would be massless.