system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Considering the Higgs field permeates all of space how is it related to a vacuum? 

Is the Higgs a by-product of a vacuum? I've read that the Higgs is "the energy of the vacuum from which all else came." Can someone explain this? Why did a vacuum exist in the first place? Does the universe exist within a vacuum? Any thoughts on the idea that matter is a 3-D representation of 2-D information?
gpt
In field theory, we work with it being given that there are space and time. The *vacuum* is the field configuration that minimizes the energy.  It turns out that it takes less energy to have a non-zero value of the Higgs field throughout space than it would to have no Higgs field.  Thus the vacuum in the Standard Model is space filled with a non-zero Higgs field.