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> Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass.

Physicist here: nope. The coupling between the Higgs field and other particle fields is what creates the phenomona of mass. The Higgs particle is just an excitation of that field.

Virtual particles aren't "real" in the same way that the first order Taylor series of sin(x) being x doesn't max x a real sinusoidal wave. All it does is let you make your calculations "close enough" for your accepted definition of "close enough."

Thanks! So if I understood you right, whatever coupling does to the fields, it's something doesn't involve virtual Higgs, is that right?

Is it fair to say that both virtual Higgs and 'real' Higgs are two types of excitations of that field, except that virtual particles can't be directly observed?

I find the name virtual particles interesting, since they don't seem to be exactly the same kind of ripples as particles, and physicists frequently seem to disagree on how 'real' they are as a matter of interpretation

Virtual particles are calculational tools. They aren’t concrete things the way you’re proposing them to be. They are closer in character to “completing the square” than they are a an actual physical object.

They are great for trying to help human brains make concrete the details of the process. But again they are just artifacts of the way we do our computations.

And the Higgs field is a particularly great example of this. If you shift a sin wave 90 degrees it becomes a cosine wave. If you don’t expand about the lowest energy of the Mexican top hot potential for the Higgs field it creates an entirely different description of the physical phenomena and virtual particles.

> Mexican top hot potential

To save someone else the trouble, no, that wasn't an autocorrect mistake on "Mexican."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breakin...

It's not the "Mexican" bit that looks like a typo; it's the "top hot" part that jumps out.

It's just "Mexican hat" potential. The `hot` was a phone keyboard typo and writing `top` was just a mental typo.

Aren't both virtual and non-virtual particles non-real - in the sense that they are both excitation/waves of/in a field. With virtual particles just being smaller waves.

Another physicist here.

> Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass.

I think you're mixing up two subtle ideas. One is virtual particles, which as lanza explains, is really a name for a step in a calculation. The other is the idea of vacuum expectation value, or vev.

As another commenter mentioned, a particle is (loosely) like a ripple on a pond. The vev tells you how much water there is, even at rest. With a simple harmonic potential (parabola shaped) the vev is the x-coordinate of the turning point (ie. the minimal energy), which we usually put at zero because of symmetry. However, the 'Mexican hat potential' respects the symmetry but has minima that aren't located at zero radius. The Higgs potential is like that, and so the Higgs has a nonzero vev.

The way the Higgs interacts with fermions implies that the masses are proportional to the Higgs vev.

Rather than it being virtual Higgses, it's more like the particles are swimming in a viscous liquid. Sleek particles aren't bothered and are hardly slowed down at all (these particles have not much mass) and some are not hydrodynamic and have a hard time.

The analogy is imperfect: the viscous soup doesn't provide friction in the way that water does (you can't give your momentum to the vacuum).

As someone else is eluding to, the concept of a virtual particle is kind of a calculation tool, but then so is all of quantum field theory. What you say sounds pretty alright to me: about as close as you can get without just following the math directly.