Yes, but a Higgs boson is much more massive than a proton, right?
Hum. So mass and energy aren’t divided in discrete quanta? A “particle” can have any (rest) mass it likes? I get the feeling I’m not asking the right questions 
Yes, but not more massive than the combined mass-energy of a couple of protons smashing into each other at warp speed.
Any particular particle has a characteristic rest mass. But there are lots of particles, and their masses extend through a considerable range.
But gasoline doesnt have to carry its own oxidizer around like TNT does. My WAG would have been 1/10 of TNT would be “fuel” and 9/10 would be the oxidizer. My WAG would have been on the money apparently.
And now you know why ignited gasoline fumes (or prettly much any flamable liquid turned into fumes) are so dangerous. It doesnt take much liquid to equal a pretty big boom)
Here’s one way to think about it:
A magnet creates a magnetic field that affects the motion of nearby charged particles. This field is caused by the exchange of virtual photons between the magnet and the particles. They’re called “virtual” because, while they follow the same laws as normal photons, they pop in and out of existence by “borrowing” energy from the vacuum and then “paying it back” later.
The Higg’s field is a field like the magnetic field produced by a magnet, except it’s everywhere in space all the time. Just like a magnetic field only affects some particles while leaving others alone, the Higg’s field only affects particles that have mass. In fact, being affected by the Higg’s field is what gives particles mass. It makes them “sticky” with respect to space.
The Higg’s field is caused by the exchange of virtual Higg’s bosons that spontaneously pop in and out of existence just like virtual photons. However, if you want a Higg’s boson to stick around so you can study it, you have to “pay off the energy debt”. That means you have to pump enough energy into one location that the boson doesn’t just get sucked back into the vacuum. That’s what the LHC does.
The fact that a Higg’s boson itself has mass simply means that its behavior is influenced by the exchange of other virtual Higg’s bosons that are popping and and out of existence to create the Higg’s field.
Another way to think of it is that the Higg’s field is like a lake with corks bobbing in it. The corks are particles with mass. The field affects the movement of the corks, without being part of the corks. The LHC is trying to create a little temporary Higg’s boson ice cube floating in the lake. It too will be affected by the surrounding Higg’s field, because it has mass, but it’s separate from the field and can be studied.
Does that help?
Somewhat, yes If I understand you correctly, the virtual Higgs bosons that give stuff mass aren’t actually part of the larger massive particles, they’re part of the “fabric” of space. That makes some sort of sense.
Does any of this also give an indication of what the link is between inertial mass and gravity?
Grr … ignore all the stupid apostrophes … .
I really enjoy discussions like this. Every now and then, one of my neurons goes, “Hey! I understood that!”
Voices in the wilderness, though.
Great post. 
Absolutely!
This is why gasoline is so hard to beat as a motor vehicle fuel: it’s extremely energy-dense.
High explosives typically aren’t very energetic compared to hydrocarbon fuels; TNT is pretty ordinary in terms of HE energy density. The key difference is that HE’s release their energy extremely rapidly, via detonation. Gasoline-air mixtures will detonate under extreme circumstances (e.g. in an engine that’s overheating, and/or has extremely advanced spark timing), but under most other conditions will deflagrate.
The laminar flame speed for gasoline-air mixtures is on the order of 1 foot per second, but is sped up greatly by turbulence (this is why a race car engine can make power at ~20 krpm). Still, this is almost negligible compared to the reaction speed of high explosives. TNT, for example, has a detonation velocity around 22,000 feet per second.
So while 2.8 gallons of gasoline may singe things and may blow the doors off of a room due to bulk overpressure, 80 pounds of TNT (the same amount of energy, delivered more rapidly) will create a destructive shock wave that will destroy the entire house and shatter windows a 1/2 mile away.
The LHC’s beam would be dumped into the emergency dump system with extreme rapidity. The circular tunnel is 17 miles around; assuming they are traveling at the speed of light (Wikipedia says that’s about right), then the beam’s energy will be dumped over a period of about 90 microseconds - slower than a detonation wave crossing an 80-pound brick of TNT, but not by much.
For some values of “may singe things and may blow the doors off”
Fuel vapors may not be TNT, but they aint anything to mess around with either, as this firefigher found out.
A word of caution is in order, here: For some purposes, including the one you’re using here (how long it would take for the particles at the other end of the loop to reach the dumping point), it’s perfectly valid and pretty good approximation to say that the particles are traveling at the speed of light. But in other contexts (such as trying to calculate the energy of the particles), it’s absolutely couldn’t-be-wronger dead wrong.
Update: the experiment has already produced one important result, physicists have discovered a new particle (named, for now, the “paleoparticle”).
http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100401.html
The article says the new particle is neutral. Any word if it’s lawful neutral or chaotic neutral?
Silly, lawful neutral and chaotic neutral don’t exist any more. It’s impossible to be lawful unless you’re good, and it’s impossible to be chaotic unless you’re evil.
I beg your hardon?
.
♫I never promised you a hose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.♫
So, are we going back to Newton?
So if I stick my head in the accelerator, I’ll hear a distinct ‘whooooosh’ as it whizzes past me?
No. There are certainly relativistic effects, it’s just that saying that the mass increases is a really messy way to try to describe them.