exploringthecosmos:

People generally have an intuition for what mass* is, but no one quite understands it to the level that we would like. You can easily distinguish between an object that has little mass, say an ant, and an object that is very massive, like an elephant. The order of magnitude difference between the mass of an ant and an elephant is equivalent to that of the span of all masses of fundamental particles; masses of fundamental particles span about eleven orders of magnitude, but why? Where does all this stuff come from? There are several mechanisms by which mass arises but we will only focus on one method: The Higgs Mechanism.