So, I was watching some stuff about how virtual W bosons are needed mediate the weak force for radioactivity.
Are Higgs bosons (virtual or "real") needed for any normal things that happen in particle physics? Or are they just self excitations of the Higgs field?
So, any fermion can directly interact with the Higgs field with there being a Higgs Boson, right?
Higgs bosons don't do much at all; they are just a result of the Higgs field, which allows fermions to have mass, and hence to propagate at less than
c.
Even that is not a big deal on human scales; most of the mass we encounter is bonding energy, rather than being attributable to the Higgs field.
You can't separate particles and fields; the one is characteristic of the other. But it's the Higgs field that gives fermions their mass; and the Higgs boson is just along for the ride - it must exist, if the eponymous field exists; and that gives an experimental handle to the boffins at the LHC, but given its (relatively) large mass, it's not a particle that is particularly commonplace. Even at high collision energies, there are not many Higgs bosons generated.
The Higgs mechanism allows particles to have mass; but most mass is energy, rather than particles themselves, so mass due to Higgs is a very small proportion of the mass of an object at human scales.
That said, nothing interacts with a field absent a virtual particle; a virtual particle IS an interaction with a field. It's fields all the way down. The turtle is just a characteristic of the turtle field with a local maximum at the approximate location of the particle.
I probably shouldn't try to explain quantum field theory while drunk; but then, if you are trying to understand it while sober, more fool you.
