en three successive levels of force unification, a great deal of heat is released reflecting the loss of symmetry (analogously to the “heat of condensation” released by rain or freezing water). This energy materializes as the heat and particle-antiparticle pairs characteristic of the “Big Bang”.
“Real” (temporal) particles are left floating on the “surface” of the spacetime sea as it cools, while the virtual particles sink beneath the waves. They are all still there in unlimited potential, but are seen only if enough energy can be brought to bear locally to materialize them, to raise them to the surface of the “sea” and give them again a brief “life”.
In the Universe today, with the cosmic background radiation (the basal temperature of spacetime) at about 2.7K, the virtual particle sea is rarely seen because the spacetime metric is cold and energy sparse – a necessary condition, however, for our life form. But just occasionally, for very brief instants, due to quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy focused around and by the presence of a real particle, the particles of the “virtual sea” can be raised again to perform their former duties, like the ghostly crew of a phantom ship. The weak force IVBs are especially difficult to materialize because they are so heavy, hence weak force transformations are rare and for this reason the force is said to be “weak”.
I have called the weak force IVBs “metric particles”, because I conceive of them as simply quantized “knots” of very dense spacetime metric, whose “mass” is a consequence of the very great energy required to compress (and perhaps convolute) the spacetime metric to such a density and/or configuration. The IVBs simply recreate the very dense metric of the early moments of the Big Bang when all elementary particles were so close together that they could freely swap and exchange charges and energies amongst themselves without danger of violating any charge or energy conservation law – because being so close together (or actually “touching”), exchanges can happen very quickly.
The “W” IVB family specifically recreates the energy-dense metric of the electroweak force unification era, the moment during the “Big Bang” when the electric and weak forces were united. During this time, quark-quark transformations and lepton-lepton transformations were simply part of the natural course of events – a state of greater symmetry than we know today – a state of “generic” unity/identity rather than specific distinctions – (the cultural analog is a bygone “golden age” or “state of grace” (such as the “Garden of Eden”).
Today the role of these metric catalysts, the IVBs, is to bring together within their dense metric a “real” particle ripe for a transformation (typically carrying excess bound energy), and an appropriate particle-antiparticle pair from the virtual sea, such that the charges of the virtual particle pair can be made available to the real particle, and the energy of the real particle can be made available to the virtual pair, facilitating and effecting the transformation of both.
The most significant feature of the massive IVBs is that they recreate the original conditions of the energy-dense primordial metric in which particles were first created and transformed during the early micro-moments of the “Big Bang”. This recapitulation (which is scaled or “gauged” by the Higgs boson) ensures that the original and invariant values of charge, mass, energy, etc. are handed on to the next generation of (single) elementary particles, which must be created exactly the same today as those created during the “Big Bang”. The IVB mass not only provides a “conservation containment” where charge and energy transfers can safely take place, it simultaneously ensures that the appropriate alternative charge carriers are present (leptons, neutrinos, mesons). (See: “Identity Charge and the Weak Force”.)
There is a crucial difference between the electromagnetic or strong force creation of particles via symmetric particle-antiparticle pair formation, and the weak force creation or transformation of asy