Thread: Don Wheeler

My question is, if an energy particle going through the Higgs field and interacting with a Higgs particle gives it mass and mass has gravity then isn't the Higgs particle gravity?

The way you have to talk about the Higgs makes it sound like the Higgs is gravity itself, but it isn't. People use "graviton" for that particle, which exchanged between two massive particles, carries the force of gravity. The Higgs provides the mass itself, not the force. A rough analogy would be a massless wheelbarrow carrying stones. The stones represent the Higgs particles giving mass to the wheelbarrow; the gravitons are the gravity pulling on the system.

Of course, we don't really know how to combine Quantum Mechanics and gravity. Speaking of gravitons carries an assumption that when we do, gravity will in some approximation or other act much like the other forces or vice-versa. Since the Higgs is so closely tied to both mass and gravity, you might speculate that studying the Higgs will eventually give us some clues about quantized gravity, but then maybe it won't.

Massless particles like the photon are also subject to gravity, yet they don't interact with the Higgs field...

Originally Posted by Markus Hanke

Massless particles like the photon are also subject to gravity, yet they don't interact with the Higgs field...

I assume you mean this to be an argument against the Higgs particle helping us learn about Quantum gravity. I agree that the observation is a good argument against this possibility, but it doesn't hurt to hope that something will turn up in the data provided you don't get too committed to the idea.