Why do the known elementary particles, such as quarks and electrons, have such different masses?
One pivotal building block of the Standard Model has yet to be observed. It’s called the Higgs boson, after British theoretician Peter Higgs, who theorised the eponymous particle as an elegant after-the-fact fudge to explain why the mass of elementary particles spans such a humongous range, with the top quark being 370,000 times heavier than the electron. The nature of mass is truly an old riddle. Newton and Einstein both plunked down m for mass in their famous equations, but neither explained where the property came from. The puzzle is actually even deeper than that, entering into a nether region called spontaneous symmetry breaking, a physicist’s catchphrase for an especially perplexing conundrum. At the fundamental level, the same mathematical equations describe both the electromagnetic force, such as light waves, and the weak force inside the nucleus, which is involved in radioactivity. But they look nothing alike. The belief is that in the early universe some unknown agent came al
