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First of all, in no way do I have advanced knowledge of particle physics, quantum mechanics, or any other necessary scientific concept for a full understanding of this question. Secondly, this is purely hypothetical; I am a writer looking to explore fictional concepts that are guided by science, not strictly within its realm.

Could there be something like the Higgs field which gives particles their energy in a similar way to how the Higgs boson gives particles their mass? What conditions would there need to be for the existence of this field? Could it exist without changing existing, fundamental laws? Keep in mind that, as it's fiction, new processes can exist to allow it. I understand that the Higgs boson does not literally give particles mass; i.e: there aren't Higgs bosons clustered around particles and making them massive.

I'm guessing there's something fundamentally wrong with this question (meaning my understanding of energy and mass) that makes it unanswerable or difficult to answer directly. If you can find a way around it, hats off to you! And thanks very much to anyone who answers at all. Again, I really have no idea what I'm talking about, so feel free to brush the question off as complete nonsense.

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    $\begingroup$ Welcome to Worldbuilding! This is a good question. Remember to only ask one question per post... if you have follow up questions, make a new post ... you’ll get much better answers that way. Also, don’t be surprised if someone edits your questions. If it is a bad edit, you can always revert it, but vast majority of edits are people helping make questions more readable — and therefore more answerable! See you around! $\endgroup$
    – SRM
    Jan 19, 2020 at 20:32
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    $\begingroup$ 1) E=mc^2 2) Otherwise energy stems from movement itself, not any field. $\endgroup$
    – Mithoron
    Jan 19, 2020 at 20:58
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    $\begingroup$ The Higgs boson is the force carrying particle of the Higgs field. The Higgs field gives some (lightweight) particles their mass; only a very small part of the mass of a body is due to the Higgs field. (And energy is a state function, not an intrinsic property of a body; the same body can have different energy at different times, depending on its state at those times. Moreover, the energy of a body depends on who is interested: that is, there is no such thing as the energy of a body.) $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Jan 19, 2020 at 23:35
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    $\begingroup$ Mass is a property of particles - energy is not. Particles themselves are considered energy, along with any fields. So a field that gives particles energy would be the field that generates those particles, and itself, which is paradoxical. So, unfortunately, your question is indeed fundamentally flawed, and therefore unanswerable. However, their are some forms of energy, such as kinetic or heat, which are properties of particles, and so you could say that there is some field that gives properties movement, but all attempts to describe motion or heat in this sense have completely failed. $\endgroup$
    – Snowshard
    Jan 20, 2020 at 0:59
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    $\begingroup$ To follow up what AlexP said: what are you thinking of, when you say "energy"? Energy isn't really a tangible thing. Glowy scifi special effects described as energy fields, or worse "pure energy" are just magic. $\endgroup$
    – Starfish Prime
    Jan 20, 2020 at 9:48

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In most quantum field theories1, we have a quantity called the Lagrangian, from which we can derive information about the behavior of our system. It consists of a number of terms representing different quantum fields. Now, we are mathematically forbidden from naïvely adding mass terms by something called a gauge symmetry. However, it turns out that we can add in a particular type of quantum field that breaks that symmetry and implicitly contains the mass terms we need. This field is the Higgs field. Though a more detailed discussion of this is beyond our scope here, el duderino wrote an excellent introduction on the Higgs field in an answer to a different question, and these notes give a couple interesting examples of adding in the Higgs.

Why, then, won't your proposal work? Well, there's no such thing as an "energy term" in the Lagrangian. It's not a property associated with a quantum field; rather, it's a property of each particle associated with that field. Therefore, it doesn't really make sense - mathematically or physically - to talk about energy terms or an energy analog of the Higgs.

1Some quantum field theories have no Lagrangian formulation, but this doesn't provide a loophole for your problem.

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    $\begingroup$ There are field theories without a Lagrangian but you still can't have energy come from a field the same way mass come from the Higgs mechanism. $\endgroup$
    – Harry Wilson
    Feb 16, 2020 at 14:01
  • $\begingroup$ @HarryWilson Thanks - I didn't know those existed. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 ♦
    Feb 17, 2020 at 18:16

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