Thread:Wormulon/@comment-5172448-20121030192912/@comment-1073312-20121030205257

Its an interesting concept, and I do like it. I'm not quite sure if it would work by the way you described it (diffusing mass over distance), and I'll explain why because you are very interested.

There is a distinction between the higgs boson and the higgs field. The field is a ''scalar field" which means it permeates all of spacetime thanks to spontaneous symmetry breaking in the early universe. Imagine the field as a graph in two dimensions, at the top is potential energy and the horizontal line is the field itself (like a mexican hat.

The Higgs boson merely carries information between the field and a particle. It is the way the particle interacts with the field which is important here. A massless particle sits at the bottom with the lowest energy configuration, while say a neutrino would oscillate which gives the particles intrinsic energy slowing the neutrino to below the speed of light. The energy is never zero and the leftover is mass. I've skipped a lot in this explanation though so not to lose track.

Of course different particles have different oscillations on our 'mexican hat field'. The higgs boson only exists for a brief unit in time and it too has mass because it interacts with the higgs field itself. My guess is that the only reason why it exists is because nature is conserving the field's energy. The higgs mechanism doesn't actually explain why composite matter (from protons/neutrons and to you or I), that is explained because it takes a lot of energy to confine quarks and gluons into hadrons.

This is why I'm not sure if diffusing mass is possible - simply because mass is not like a substance, it is a weird property that you get from the way fields interact and conserve energy. There may be other ways to get the Bosonic Obliterator to work though. Weknow for example, the higgs field had a zero value which means it can change (and might be ancelled out). The hard part is getting scalar fields to coexist (and why I abandoned my false vacuum technology for an alternative).