[quote=“Pasta, post:60, topic:579746”]
I’m not sure I understand your statement. Which real particles don’t have to exist for whose mass to be conferred onto which other particles?
Maybe I’ve misunderstood Chronos’ post:
It was sounding like the field was necessary to confer mass, but the particles not necessarily so.
So that does sound like there is no mystery unless we never find the HB after conducting sifting through all the possibilities. I’ll bet we find it in the last place we look.
Yeah, you read too much into Chronos quibble. He was making a side note that “vacuum” means “empty, except for virtual particles popping into and out of existence” and that (virtual) Higgs bosons can do that just like anything else.
I just remembered, there’s actually an approach that I think does pretty much what you’re thinking about known as Sakharov or induced gravity; in brief, if you start out with an ordinary quantum field theory containing only matter fields, i.e. no gravity, the action of general relativity emerges from the dynamics, in a manner of speaking induced by the quantum fields’ vacuum fluctuations. I’m not sure how directly one can relate this to Casimir effects, though; in particular, Casimir forces aren’t always attractive, which gravity is generally taken to be.
Interestingly, one of the guys who proposed that (Nielsen) is now claiming that the recently-observed CDF bump (at Tevatron, nothing to do with the LHC Higgs rumours) actually is the Higgs boson. So that may tell you how much confidence he has in his own previous work… 
Just to keep everybody playing along at home current, there’s a new rumour out saying that the old rumour (of a Higgs detection) was wrong – more specifically, the ATLAS detector has been busily collecting data, and the now larger dataset apparently doesn’t show any significant difference from expected backgrounds, meaning that the earlier ‘detection’ was just a statistical fluke. Or at least that’s what Jester over at Résonaances says…
I’m reading Lisa Randalls “Knocking on Heavens Door” and it mentions “Photons have mass in a superconductor from electrons for the same reason particles have mass from the higgs boson” This is the only link I could find from 12 years ago. But I THINK there’s some kind of equivalence to permeability and permittivity for light that applies to particles and that gives them mass.