The NY Times article on Firewalls today has the following paragraph:
Quantum field theory is how the world works [quoting a physicist]. It had a major triumph just a year ago, when the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle responsible for the mass of other subatomic particles, was discovered after a 40-year search, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Is it correct that
the Higgs (boson, mechanism, field, etc) is needed for QFT per se, or
is it "just" needed for the particular application of QFT known as the standard model, electroweak theory etc?
Couldn't QFT still be the correct framework for "how the world works" if the Higgs model turned out to be wrong?