At the center of nearly every galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. Its gravity is so strong that it warps space itself. But few stop to wonder: what does it do to the very fabric of reality — the fields that permeate the cosmos?
One such field is the Higgs field. Under normal conditions, it acts like a thick syrup: the more a particle 'gets stuck' in it, the heavier it becomes. Without it, electrons would be massless and would fly off at the speed of light, and atoms simply wouldn't form. The new work shows that inside a black hole, this syrup becomes increasingly thin. The culprit is the monstrous curvature of space, measured by a mathematical quantity — the Kretschmann scalar. The author introduces a coupling between the Higgs field and this curvature and finds: the closer to the hole's center, the weaker the field's influence. At some critical radius (for a typical stellar black hole, roughly one hundred-thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus), the Higgs field completely 'switches off.' Electroweak symmetry is restored, and particles stop feeling their familiar mass.
This critical point lies deep below the event horizon, but still far from the Planck scale, where spacetime is thought to dissolve into quantum foam. That means ordinary physics still applies there. It's a kind of 'pocket' inside the black hole where the usual laws of the microworld are temporarily suspended, yet the theory itself remains workable.
If the Higgs field suddenly vanished across the entire universe, electrons would become massless, and the size of atoms would grow to infinity, the world would instantly evaporate.
In Peter Watts's novel Blindsight, alien beings use fields reminiscent of the Higgs field to control their own biology and the space around them.