Worked example - how heavy is the Higgs boson, really? Its mass is quoted as 125 GeV/c^2. Using E = mc^2, its rest energy is simply E = 125 GeV (the c^2 cancels by definition of the units). A proton's rest energy is 0.938 GeV. Dividing: 125 / 0.938 = 133.2. So one Higgs boson weighs as much as about 133 protons. Yet it lives only about 10^-22 seconds before decaying - most often into a pair of bottom quarks, or into two photons via a quantum loop. Detectors never see the Higgs directly; they reconstruct it from its decay products, like identifying a firecracker from the pattern of its sparks.