 In 1964, in order to resolve this problem, Francois Englert, Robert Brout, Peter Higgs and others proposed a new field that permeated all of space, now called the Higgs Field. They proposed that this field contained a condensate of weak charge. A condensate has the property that adding to it or subtracting from it leaves it the same. A particle carrying weak charge could use a weak charged virtual zebo-son to move the charge to this condensate without noticeably changing the field. And it could use the same zebo-son mechanism to absorb a weak charge from the condensate without noticeably changing the field. This was called the Higgs Mechanism. With the Higgs Mechanism, an elementary particle that carries a weak hypercharge can oscillate and therefore has mass. Electrons, neutrinos and quarks all carry this charge and interact with the Higgs Field, so they can oscillate and therefore they have mass. Photons don't carry a weak hypercharge and therefore they cannot interact with the Higgs Field and therefore they cannot oscillate and therefore, no matter how much energy they may have, they have no mass. The process is a little different from particle to particle and physicists use subtler concepts of chirality, gauge symmetry and symmetry breaking, but this is the basic idea. You'll note that the particles that interact with the Higgs Field are not slowed down. The Higgs Field is not like molasses. If the Higgs Field slowed particles down in any way, objects in motion would no longer remain in motion. This is not what we see in the real world. Here's one more important idea about mass. The reason the masses are different for different particles is that the coupling strength of the interaction with the Higgs Field is stronger for some particles than others. Increasing the coupling strength is like increasing the stiffness of the spring in a harmonic oscillator. It has the effect of increasing the oscillator's frequency. And we have already determined that if we increase a particle's oscillation frequency, we increase its mass. Now we can ask, what is a Higgs boson? We have learned that, under the right circumstances, excited fields generate particles. This also applies to the Higgs Field. If it exists, it has an associated particle. That particle is called the Higgs boson. So working in reverse, if we can find the Higgs boson, we'll have strong evidence that the Higgs Field exists, and the Higgs mechanism is real, and the standard model of particle physics is correct. Quantum field theory predicts that this particle's mass should be around 125 giga electron volts, with zero spin, called a scalar boson. Note that all the other force particle bosons, the photons, gluons, W and Z bosons, get a spin of one, and are called vector bosons. This large mass, around 133 times more massive than a proton, makes it difficult to form one. It takes a great deal of energy. At the time the Higgs boson was proposed, no existing accelerator could do the job. This is why the large Hadron Collider at CERN was built.