| | Scientific American: The Mysteries of Mass (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19) |
 | | In terms of the valley metaphor, for ordinary fields the valley floor is at the location of zero field; for the Higgs, the valley has a hillock at its center (at zero field) and the lowest point of the valley forms a circle around the hillock. |
 | | First, without the Higgs mechanism, the W and Z bosons that mediate the weak force would be massless, just like the photon (which they are related to), and the weak interaction would be as strong as the electromagnetic one. |
 | | What is discovered about Higgs bosons will not only test whether the Higgs mechanism is indeed providing mass, it will also point the way to how the Standard Model can be extended to solve problems such as the origin of dark matter. |
| www.sciam.com /print_version.cfm?articleID=000005FC-2927-12B3-A92783414B7F0000 (3707 words) |