The physics in the press article is wrong:<p>> <i>Mass, in a nutshell, is not what you think it is. Not by a long chalk.According to Lederman and Hill, a subatomic particle such as a muon, which feels the weak nuclear force, flickers back and forth between a right and a left corkscrewing form (the flicker is known as Zitterbewegung).</i><p>This is not Zitterbewegung, it’s a change of Chirality.<p>Zitterbewegung: For technical reasons, too long to explain, the velocity of the subatomic particles can be constant, the best next thing is to have particles that travel with a constat average velocity, but have an aditional oscilation, like x(t) = x_0 + v_0 * t + a * cos(w * t), (more details, about a and w in wikipedia.) The important thing is that it is an oscillation in the real xyz space, very small, but it’d be possible to see it with a magical microscopy, because the particle is moving ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung</a> )<p>Chirality / (very similar to Helicity): There are two tipe of muons the left-handed muons and the right-handed muons. They look similar and have the same mass (whatever that means), but they are very different, for example only the left-handed muons feel the weak force. Using the magic microscopy, we would not see that the particle is oscilatiog, we would see that the particle is spinning ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics)</a> )<p>Really, the left-handed muons are constantly transforming into right-handed muons, and the right-handed muons are constantly transforming into left-handed muons. This transformation is related to the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field, that is very related to the Higgs boson, but to explaining the differences I need to write a long and technical explanation.<p>> <i>If, however, the muon could be boosted to the speed of light, its time would slow to a standstill, as predicted by Einstein's special theory of relativity. A particle that experiences no passage of time is a photon, so the muon would appear like a photon. Since a photon has no rest mass, running with the photon analogy, neither would the superfast muon. Its mass would have been "switched off". But all that has happened to it is that the flickering between left and right forms has stopped. The inference is that this oscillation is what gives a muon its mass.</i><p>Simply wrong! Just for an example, it this idea where correct, when the muon is traveling at half the light speed, it would have less mass than a static moun.