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(Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson | Live Science):
Does the Higgs field explain relativity’s finding that as things go faster they acquire more mass?
Simple answer: no.
Longer answer: the Higgs field effects what’s called the “rest mass” of conventional matter, i.e., the mass that this particle would have if it was at rest. The fact that there’s a “relativistic mass” that seems to change as an object moves faster would be the same regardless of whether mass was due to the Higgs field or whether it was inherent in the particles themselves. The reasons that the Higgs field was theorized in the first place have nothing to do with the “relativistic mass”.
You didn’t ask but I’m telling you anyways: the very notion of “relativistic mass” is rather outdated. Most physicists don’t use it any more, preferring to redefine the formulas for an object’s energy and momentum rather than redefining its mass.
The Higgs mechanism isn’t even responsible for all, or even most, mass. Quarks and electrons have masses because of the Higgs process, but the mass of a proton or neutron is much greater than the sum of the masses of its constituent quarks. The remainder is due to binding energy of the quarks, which has nothing at all to do with the Higgs process. And since protons and neutrons form the vast majority of the mass that we’re familiar with, in turn that means that the majority of mass we’re familiar with isn’t due to Higgs.
No, no, no! Dark Matter is Aether. So it is written; so it shall be done, dammit.
The Higgs field is not a mechanism for anything to do with relativity. It’s completely unrelated to relativity (aside from the general fact that it’s involved with particle physics and interactions there are usually relativistic in nature.)
I wish pop-science writers would stop saying nonsense like this. That analogy means absolutely nothing, and it doesn’t help anyone understand what’s actually going on or why it’s important. (I don’t know how you would explain a complicated physics topic without using any actual physics, but making vague statements like that doesn’t help at all. Besides, the thinking is certainly not, “Hey, swimmers moving through a pool get wet— maybe that’s how W and Z bosons acquire mass!”)
The resistance of the water would do a better job, with different particles having different hydrodynamics.
Again, that’s a vague classical analogy (the Higgs field is not a physical medium that particles propagate through, and the interaction isn’t like drag) that’s inaccurate here and doesn’t contribute anything to understanding this issue. The Higgs mechanism is important because it solves a technical problem, and discovering the Higgs particle is important because it fills in a significant, long-standing gap between theorized particles and what’s actually been found. That having been said, if you’re not a physicist, then the Higgs field probably doesn’t matter to you; and like most things in modern physics, there’s too much background required to even explain the ideas coherently in a short pop-science article. Similarly, I work in algebraic topology, and there was a brief flurry of news articles in the popular press about the Kervaire invariant problem when it was solved a few years ago. None of them had anything to say beyond, “Yeah, there was this long-standing problem that had something to do with spheres…and now it’s solved, hooray!” and there wasn’t much that could be said beyond that.
While we’re on the subject, “The Universe Should Have Collapsed.” Can someone explain this? All I know about bosons is that it may be something I smoked in high skool.
Well, there’s nothing in the article to go on. Apparently some of the CERN data led to estimates relating to cosmic background data that weren’t what some cosmologists expected. There’s not much there to comment on.
Anyway, loosely speaking*, bosons are part of fundamental forces, while fermions are ordinary matter. Quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons and neutrinos are fermions. Photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons are bosons; they mediate the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces, respectively. The hypothetical graviton is also a boson. The Higgs boson is, as you might guess from the name, a boson (but it’s not connected to the gravitational force). There also composite particles that are bosons but just fly around, or do whatever it is that particles do, without being attached to a particular force.
- Less loosely: Suppose I have two identical particles. If I swap them, then nothing’s changed, since the particles were identical. Now, the wave function of a system is only defined up to an overall sign. Thus if the old wavefunction was f, then the new one is cf for some complex number c. But repeating the swap takes the function to c^2 f, which must reproduce the original wavefunction— and not just up to a constant multiple. That means c is either +1 or -1. Bosons have the former; fermions have the latter. (The fact that this sign is intrinsic to the particle, rather than changing over time or depending on the particular state it’s in, is nontrivial, but it happens to be true because math.) In particular, two identical fermions can’t be in exactly the same state, since otherwise the swap would be completely trivial, and then f= -f. Oops. That gives, at least to a first approximation, atomic theory and chemistry.
I love the line:
“While the data shows the universe should not exist, it clearly does, leading some to question exactly how the findings should be interpreted”.
Ignorance fought.
That’s not a very good article. Here’s the press release from the Royal Astronomical Society, which has more detail.
The source of the prediction is explained in these two paragraphs:
They don’t provide a justification for the bolded statements, however.
I’ve read elsewhere that the large masses of the Higgs boson and the Top quark somehow indicate the depth of this possible deeper valley (or can indicate, depending on whether you believe in String theory and supersymmetry, and which particular model of them).
Apart from that, the validity of the interpretation of the BICEP2 polarization measurements as being caused by gravitational waves, rather than intervening dust, has been called into question. That could affect these results, since presumably the “kicks” would be smaller if much or all of the polarization effects were from dust rather than gravitational waves.
Yeah, in my experience “higher” physics explanations boil down to two experiences: either silly analogies like tramples or (as you say) swimming pools, or incomprehensible gibberish.
There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.
Edited to add: in my work, I spend a lot of time explaining complicated and sometimes contradictory information to people who aren’t educated in my field and sometimes aren’t very smart. Physicists don’t seem to be very good at that.
I don’t know what sort of field you’re in, but I think the issue with physics is that the ideas are abstract and genuinely hard to understand if you don’t have the necessary background. Look at the countless tedious discussions about special relativity here and on every other message board, for example. And that’s easy physics; it’s long-settled, century-old, basic stuff. For that matter, most people think of basic quantum mechanics— sophomore- or junior-undergrad level material— as some ineffable theory that even the best scientists don’t understand. If you want to explain complicated concepts to uneducated or unintelligent people, you have to tie it into something they’re familiar with and do understand. I’m not a medical doctor, for example, but I’m familiar with basic anatomy and care about not being sick. With particle physics, there isn’t really any reference like that available. (Ditto for math, though fortunately we aren’t in the news very often.) It’s not that physicists are bad at it; it’s just that you can’t understand modern physics, even at the level of knowing what the things being talked about are, without having a reasonable background in the subject. The popular idea that you can explain any bit of science in words and concepts an eight-year-old could understand (or, worse, that you don’t truly understand the matter yourself if you can’t do so) is utter garbage.
I would be happier if the article didn’t mention anything at all, or simply said that physicists did something awesome that is important in physics, without coming up with some labored metaphor or analogy. I suppose the proper way to teach the public about these matters is start from basic concepts and work upward, but pop-science articles aren’t meant to teach; they’re meant to point out interesting things that scientists do and make people feel marginally smarter for having had them pointed out. Meh.
Well I’m glad to hear that ZenBeam. And here I was beginning to question my existence. Tip of the hat to “Itself” for explaining the difference between bosons and fermions. So yeah, I’m now fairly certain it was fermions I smoked in high skool, not bosons.
I wholly concur with your entire post, including this. I just want to make one observation. It’s been my experience that science journalists generally have a very poor grasp of the science they’re writing about. I remember my surprise in my younger days the first time I discovered this. I had sort of imagined them to be people trained in science who had somehow stumbled into writing about it as a career. While no doubt there are exceptions, it turns out that most of them are wannabe creators of The Next Great Novel who stumbled into writing about science as a way to make a living. What I’m suggesting is that they don’t know enough about the subject matter to invent these labored metaphors or analogies themselves, and I’m pretty sure most of these tropes come from a few over-enthusiastic researchers understandably anxious to communicate the excitement of a new discovery. The analogies may be terrible, but I think your blame for them may be misplaced.
Physicists Discover Something Awesome.
A team of physicists at Idontgoto University issued a press release today claiming that they had discovered something really awesome that would truly impress other physicists. Unfortunately this reporter can’t understand what it is they discovered, or why anyone should care (if they actually should), at all, so I can’t explain it to you, but it does not really matter, because you wouldn’t understand it anyway.
A ten billion dollar government grant is being sought for further research to confirm and follow up this awesome discovery.
What are the implications of this new finding? You’d have to be a physicist to understand that, silly.
But I assure you, if you were a physicist your mind would be blown right now.
Oddly enough, most of the science writers and journalists I know personally (which is a significant number, but certainly not enough to make it anything more than an anecdote) are geeks who like science but aren’t scientists, and did stumble into it as a potential career. In any case, I don’t blame them personally, since there isn’t really a solution to the problem; science has just gotten to complex for the layman to follow in some cases. I’m just waiting for all of the overwrought articles about the religious and philosophical implications of the “God particle” to die out.
Speaking of which, here’s Deepak Chopra talking about the discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s a virtual possibility field that creates mass, energy, and space-time!
Oh, aren’t you sweet. And here I thought I was going to have to pay someone to fertilize my thousand-acre field.
Anyway, one of the biggest challenges to understanding physics, for me, was to stop trying to fit it into a common-sense world. My common sense was formed by things in the classical limit, which are huge enough that h seems tiny, slow enough that c seems fast, and tiny enough that very few discrete things are forced to be nearly-spherical due to gravity. It’s parochial. It’s like someone who grew up in England being unable to comprehend a large desert, or someone who grew up in Central Asia being unable to comprehend a deep ocean.
There’s nothing special about my scale and speed, and expecting everything to behave like a cannonball does me no favors.
Sadly, science journalists are writing for people who don’t understand any of the above. And thus Chopra still has a job.