So Peter Higgs (along with Belgian Francois Englert) gets a Nobel Prize for predicting the Higgs Boson. At least dear old Peter Higgs will probably have passed away by the time the Higgs Mechanism becomes discarded as yet another blind alley in the annals of theoretical physics.
This prize for the Higgs really goes as a consolation prize to the LHC effort at CERN, the largest and most expensive instrument ever made by humanity, which has so far failed to find anything to significantly advance our knowledge.
The expense, the hype, and the self justificatory overstatement of results have reached epic, indeed almost Euroscale dimensions.
The Higgs mechanism was devised initially to explain the unexpectedly high masses of the W and Z bosons and was then extended to explain the origin of mass itself.
However as the theoretical Higgs field does not couple to the gluons (or whatever) that give things like protons and neutrons about 99% of their mass then it doesn’t explain a lot really, it creates a bigger problem than it solves.
If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.
If the General Relativistic equivalence of the gravitational and inertial components of mass holds, and it seems to hold to a very large number of decimal places, then plainly the Higgs Mechanism seems in conflict with it.
The astonishingly weak and elusive 125GeV signal from the LHC could arise from any number of things, it seems highly premature to ascribe it to the particle manifestation of a field which supposedly gives some but not all other particles a mass, particularly as we already have an excellent and unfalsified description of mass as spacetime curvature in General Relativity.
I guess that the masses of the W and Z bosons have rather high values because they constitute rather ‘awkward’ or ‘stressed’ arrangements of spacetime, and I suspect that this has something to do with various types of spin arrangement in extra temporal dimensions.
I shall most certainly not eat the relevant pages of The Octavo until I see better evidence for the Higgs Mechanism!