Is there an accepted analogy / conceptual aid for the Higgs field?
In Physics there are many accepted conceptual aids such as
* Schrödinger's cat
* Maxwell's Demon
* I'm sure I'm missing many, but you get the idea
Is there an accepted/standard aid for the Higgs?
I saw a popular treatment of the Higgs boson with Peter Higgs.
He talked about pearls being dragged through treacle.
But the analogy wasn't fully fleshed out, just a two second video clip
If there is not an accepted standard aid, what do the various professionals here use to aid explicating to non professionals?
Answer
This is not as easy as it may sound: in every analogy one has to make a choice between rigor and 'poetic license'.
Personally, the one i like better is Higgs for Waldegrave: where a crowd-analogy is given. But, as they say, your milage may very.
If you'd like, you can think in terms of a 'caramel pool', Milky Way Simply Caramel: Pool : when we say that a particle 'couples' to the Higgs field, we mean to say that this particle 'sees' this 'caramel pool', and this makes it "harder" for it to move, which we measure as this particle's "mass". And, as you can imagine, there are particles that do not couple to the Higgs field, meaning to say they do not "see" it: therefore, they move much more easily. ;-)
But, take all this with a grain of salt…
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