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[Raymond]

It's my gut feeling that the Higgs mechanism is the modern edition of phlogiston. Useful in predicting some features of the universe, like the Higgs particle or mass generation (strangely enough it excludes the neutrino).

The mechanism itself hasn't been seen though and there are other, more elegant ways to explain. The Higgs mechanism is rather contrived, artificial, not to mention weird explanation. A potential energy for the vacuum (top of the Mexican hat)? Huh, excuse me?

Isn't it time to set the mechanism overboard? Any thoughts?

[Consul]

The difference between phlogiston and the Higgs particle is that the latter has actually been discovered:

QUOTE>
"How We See It

If the Higgs condensate is made from just one ingredient, then we can say a lot about that ingredient. Roughly speaking, if the Higgs particle is a chunk of the condensate, the only question is how big a chunk. Thus, all the properties and behaviors of the Higgs particle can be predicted, once you know its mass. This welcome specificity meant that experimenters could plan their Higgs-hunting strategy with quite definite ideas about what they were looking for, and how they would recognize it if they found it.

In order to “discover the Higgs particle,” you must do two things: You must produce some of them and you must get evidence of their fleeting existence. Both steps are challenging. To produce heavy elementary particles, you must concentrate a lot of energy into a very small volume. This is done at high-energy accelerators, where beams of rapidly moving protons (or[176]other particles) are made to collide with target materials, or with one another. In the years prior to 2012, Higgs particle searches were mounted with a succession of ever-higher energy concentrations, but they came up empty. We know now, in retrospect, that they simply didn’t bring in enough energy. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, finally did.

The home of the LHC is a circular underground tunnel measuring about twenty-seven kilometers (seventeen miles) around, beneath a rural area straddling France and Switzerland. When the LHC is operating, two narrow beams of protons traverse the tunnel in opposite directions within a pipe that threads it. Moving at nearly the speed of light, the protons make eleven thousand orbits per second.

At four points the beams cross. Only a small fraction of the protons collide, but this still amounts to nearly a billion collisions per second. All that firepower produces the concentrations of energy it takes to make Higgs particles.

The next task is to detect them. Enormous, densely instrumented detectors surround the crossing points. One of them, the ATLAS detector, is more than twice as large as the Parthenon. The detectors track the energies, charges, and masses of the particles that emerge from the collisions, as well as their directions of motion. They feed all this information, at the rate of 25 million gigabytes per year, to a worldwide grid that links thousands of supercomputers.

All that information gathering is necessary because:

* The events are complicated. Typically, ten or more particles stream out from each one.
* Few of the events—less than one in a billion—ever contained Higgs particles.
* Those events that do contain them, don’t contain them for long. The lifetime of a Higgs particle is about 10^-22 seconds, or a tenth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
* The rare events that briefly contained Higgs particles also contain a lot of other stuff.

In short, if you’re going to find the Higgs particle, you have to understand and monitor the rest of what’s happening very well, indeed—and you’ve got to latch on to some nearly unmistakable consequence of a Higgs particle’s brief existence. Otherwise you’ll get inundated with false positives.

The discovery of the Higgs particle was announced on July 4, 2012. The signal was an excess of high-energy photon pairs. Such pairs were predicted to arise from Higgs particle decays, and the excess swamped any other plausible source. Since then, several other signals, arising out of other ways that Higgs particles can decay, have been detected as well. So far, the rates at which all these signals have occurred agree with theoretical predictions.

In “seeing” the Higgs particle, we humans expanded our perception. We peered into a behavior that Nature reveals only rarely, and for very short times, and only after vigorous prodding. To perceptive human minds, empty space will never look empty again."

(Wilczek, Frank. Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. pp. 175-7)
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[Raymond]

I wasn't referring to the particle but to the mechanism. The particle and mass are just as well explained if you consider quarks and leptons composed of two massless and truly elementary fields. There even is no matter antimatter asymmetry then. The particle no doubt exists.

[Raymond]

"In “seeing” the Higgs particle, we humans expanded our perception. We peered into a behavior that Nature reveals only rarely, and for very short times, and only after vigorous prodding. To perceptive human minds, empty space will never look empty again."

(Wilczek, Frank. Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. pp. 175-7)

The particle is seen, no doubt about that. But what about the mechanism?