Astronomers know that the quarks, electrons and other forms of normal matter found on Earth can only explain about a sixth of the mass of the universe.
The rules of their behaviour and their interaction with electrons and other charged particles, as well as the interactions of charged particles with one another, constitute QED.
Once in a great while, a neutrino does collide with something, setting off a cascade of electrons and other subatomic debris.
We had a theory of one of the four fundamental interactions, it was a good theory and it worked well – quantum electrodynamics (QED), which describes the interaction of the electrons and other charged particles with light and each other through the exchange of photons," says Kibble.
Elementary particles — the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our DNA and our iPhones — would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line.
Conversely, electrons and other objects that appear as particles in classical physics are endowed by quantum theory with wavelike properties as well, such a particle's quantum wavelength being inversely proportional to its momentum.
Louis de Broglie, a French physicist, proposed a way out of the dilemma: accept the wave particle dualism as a description not only of light but also of electrons and other entities previously assumed to be particles.
Since all of these things clearly exist, there had to be some sort of missing link, and, in 1964, several teams of theorists independently suggested that the universe must be pervaded with an invisible, undetectable energy field, which came to be known as the Higgs field: as electrons and other particles moved through it, they'd encounter a sort of resistance we measure as mass.
