Where does the Higgs field come from?
OK. It’s all well and good to say that mass comes from the Higgs field. But where does that come from? What is it exactly? Why is it there? The Higgs field, in some sense, answers the question of where mass comes from. But that merely shifts the question of explaining mass to that of explaining the Higgs field. This is still an open question, but there are some plausible answers, of different sorts. There is, first of all, purely a mathematical and theoretical answer. It so happens that there is a theorem, called Goldstone’s theorem, after Jeffrey Goldstone, who came up with it around 1960. The theorem says that when a continuous global symmetry is spontaneously broken, there must exist a massless spin-0 boson. The particle is called (generically) a Goldstone boson. Unfortunately, such a particle has never been detected. Something’s fishy. Oddly enough, there is also this puzzle regarding a massless spin-1 boson which Yang-Mills theory requires in order to carry a gauge force. Physicis
