This is a great article. One thing I don't understand: the author says:<p>> If you want to create something heavy like the Higgs boson, you have to hit the
> Higgs field with a sufficiently large (and sufficiently concentrated) burst of
> energy to give the field the necessary one quantum of energy.)<p>So when the LHC creates a spike of energy at a point large enough to create a Higgs boson, why does that energy interact with the Higgs field and get "used up" by other fields? In other words, if Higgs requires 100 units of energy and electrons require 1, why do we get 1 Higgs boson and not 100 electrons?