In his interview about the EREAMS study, Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar says something that, on first hearing, sounds like esotericism: "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as matter." For many listeners that is a reflex stop — it sounds too much like wishful thinking to be taken seriously. Yet this statement is, in fact, the central claim of the Standard Model of particle physics and has been, since the mid-1960s. If you have not heard it in that stark form before, you are in good company — mainstream science communication rarely puts it so bluntly. In this article we summarise the popular-physics account given by astrophysicists Prof. Harald Lesch and Prof. Dr. Josef M. Gaßner, and we add the technical background that is only hinted at in the video.
The Russian-doll picture: from matter to nothing
Lesch and Gaßner zoom into matter step by step. Scaled up, an atom would have roughly the dimensions of a football stadium — and its nucleus would then be about the size of a grain of rice in the centre circle. Five orders of magnitude of nothing in between. A proton, in turn, consists of three quarks plus a "glue" of gluons. And these quarks are, in the Standard Model, elementary — they are not composed of anything further.
"Those are the last particles, they really are elementary — meaning they are not composed of anything else. And here is the point: these elementary particles, if everything we do in physics is to make sense, must be massless."
— Josef M. Gaßner
Why must the quarks be massless?
Lesch and Gaßner explain the need for masslessness in everyday terms: if you simply insert a rest mass for the elementary particles into the equations of the Standard Model, the probability predictions of the theory suddenly yield values above 100 %, or even infinity. Physically absurd. So either you discard the entire theory (which agrees with experiment to 15 decimal places), or you assume that the particles are actually massless and that the measured mass arises somewhere else.
The technically precise reason is this: quarks and leptons in the Standard Model are chiral fermions. Their left- and right-handed components transform differently under the gauge group SU(2)L × U(1)Y. A direct mass term of the form m ψ̄ψ would couple these two components and thereby break gauge symmetry. The consequences: non-renormalisability and violation of unitarity at high energies — exactly what shows up as probabilities greater than 100 %. The masslessness of elementary particles is therefore not a hypothesis or a piece of modesty but a consequence of the symmetry structure that makes the Standard Model internally consistent and predictively powerful in the first place.
Peter Higgs's solution: the field that is everywhere
The elementary particles are massless — and yet we measure clearly non-zero masses for electrons, quarks, W and Z bosons. In the mid-1960s the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs — together with François Englert, Robert Brout and others — proposed an elegant resolution: there is a field pervading the entire universe, the Higgs field. The particles, which are massless in themselves, are slowed in their acceleration as they move through this field — and exactly this resistance is what experiments measure as "mass". Gaßner puts it in finance-world language:
"The Higgs field is the bad bank of our Standard Model. We had a problem inside our system, and a Scot took the black Peter."
Technically this happens through the Yukawa coupling of the fermions to the Higgs field and spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking: the Higgs field acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value, through which the fermions receive their so-called "current quark masses" and lepton masses, without the gauge symmetry being broken explicitly in the equations. The theory remains renormalisable, probabilities remain below 100 %, and the measured masses drop out as a phenomenon of interaction.
At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN the Higgs boson — the field excitation of the Higgs field — was experimentally detected in 2012. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Peter Higgs and François Englert.
The more important point: 99 % of mass is energy, not Higgs
Here is a detail that the Lesch–Gaßner video only touches on briefly but that is crucial for Lazar's claim. The masses that elementary particles receive via the Higgs mechanism are tiny: an up quark weighs about 2.2 MeV, a down quark about 4.7 MeV. A proton consists of two ups and one down — arithmetically about 9 MeV. But the measured value is 938 MeV. In other words: only about 1 % of the proton's mass comes from the rest masses of the quarks (i.e. from the Higgs mechanism). The remaining 99 % is pure binding energy — gluons, virtual sea-quark pairs and the kinetic energy of the quarks inside the proton, interpreted as mass via E = mc².
Put differently: if you step on the scales and read 80 kg, about 0.8 kg of that is "Higgs mass" — and 79.2 kg is packaged-up energy. Not stuff, but field energy with inertia.
What does this mean for Lazar's claim?
In the EREAMS interview Lazar says, in essence: "We consist of a great deal of nothing and of binding and motion energy." This statement is not esotericism; it hits the core of what modern physics says about matter — and for two independent reasons:
- The elementary particles themselves are massless (in the sense of the gauge symmetry of the Standard Model). What we measure as quark and lepton mass is an interaction with a field — the Higgs field. Without that field the particles would have zero rest mass.
- Even after including the Higgs field, almost all of the mass of visible matter (atoms, planets, bodies) is QCD binding energy — so in the strict sense no substance, but the result of dynamic interactions between fields.
The "stuff" of classical physics thus disappears completely at the fundamental level. What remains are fields and their excitations. When someone touches a sugar cube, it is not tiny solid beads they are touching — it is the electromagnetic repulsion between two extended electron clouds, whose mass in turn is 99 % binding energy.
Why is this scientifically relevant?
For the debate about consciousness, near-death experiences and mediumistic communication, this physical clarification is substantial. A core argument of the naturalistic side runs, roughly: "Everything that exists is matter, in the sense of classical observable substance." Yet this very category largely dissolves in quantum field theory. Matter is no longer an "ultimate ingredient" but an emergent pattern of field interactions. This at least means that the starting assumption — "only matter exists" — at the fundamental level itself stands in need of justification.
This is not meant as a hasty jump to "Therefore there is life after death". It is a methodological point: anyone who dismisses the reality of non-material phenomena by appeal to materialism must specify which concept of matter they are using. It is certainly not the one of the Standard Model — which is the best currently on offer in physics.
Context
This article complements our series on the scientific framing of afterlife contact and near-death experiences: the interview blog on Lazar's EREAMS study, the neurological and medical perspective, the philosophical structuring of the debate by Godehard Brüntrup and the methodological background on the topic of the majority against experts.
Sources: Lesch & Gaßner, Spins, Nichts und das Higgsfeld, YouTube channel "Urknall, Weltall und das Leben" (2014, in German), youtube.com/watch?v=7TUIvg-1VuE. Technical framing follows standard quantum field theory textbooks (Peskin/Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory; Weinberg, The Quantum Theory of Fields) and the Particle Data Group (PDG) for up-to-date values of quark masses and the proton's mass budget. 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics: François Englert & Peter Higgs, "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles".
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it links to the Lesch & Gaßner video itself, the Lazar interview on the EREAMS study and further articles on the scientific debate.