Slashdot Mirror
The Higgs Boson Re-Explained By the Mick Jagger of Physics
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jorge Cham, author of the comic strip Ph.D. comics, recently found himself on a bus crossing the Israel-Jordan border sitting next to Eilam Gross, head of the Atlas Higgs Group, one of the two groups that found the famous particle. When Cham asked Gross for feedback on the Higgs Boson animation he had done last year, Gross told Cham 'It's all wrong' and noted that he had yet to see a truly correct explanation of what the the Higgs Boson is. For the next three hours Gross, also known as the 'Mick Jagger of physics,' told Cham the story of the Higgs Boson and asked him to put it into a new comic strip. The result is a new comic re-explaining the Higgs Boson. 'So how does this explain things like inertia?' 'That's another bus ride.' As an interesting side note Gross was once asked what Higgs was good for and replied that when [J.J.] Thomson discovered the electron, in 1895, he raised a glass of champagne and proposed a toast 'to the useless electron.'"
I've been waiting years for a good explanation of Higgs!
Too bad. Still waiting.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Make sure this guy never has sticks his head out of a car window when driving, the case of Liplash would rob of from his talent!
(Thank yew, Thank yew, I'm here till next tuesday, don't forget to tip the waitresses!)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
This explanation and comic are very good, but it makes the same fundamental mistake that so many physicists have made in trying to explain the Higgs field. It compares the field to molasses, slowing down particles by "sticking" to them, or providing some sort of friction to slow them down to sub-light speeds. This is fundamentally incorrect as molasses, or any other frictional medium, opposes the motion of particles, slowing them down until they eventually come to rest with respect to the frictional medium (molasses in this analogy). This is not at all how the Higgs field works. It doesn't oppose the motion of particles at all. In fact, Newton's law of inertia states that a body in motion will continue in motion at the same velocity until acted upon by an external force, and this is still true even in the presence of the Higgs field. There's nothing molasses-like about it at all. In fact, as a relativistic field the Higgs field has no rest frame. Put in other words, the Higgs field has no velocity of its own, zero or otherwise. If it did, it would break a fundamental symmetry law of special relativity: namely that all inertial frames of reference are equivalent. No field that behaves anything like molasses would be consistent with that principle.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I'd rather hear the Neil De Gras Tyson of Rock and Roll.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
please stop using the word “god” when you’re talking about the god damn thing! Mkay?
Just like planets had to orbit in circles because circles are beautiful?
Does the (Higgs) Field exist or did we invent it to make our equations work? Who knows? That's the genius of mankind!
Did we just pull all this out of our ass to make our theories work? Who knows, that's the GENIUS!
FFS -- Having this guy debate Ken Hamm would result in a devision by zero error.
So who's the Weird Al of Physics?
While symmetry may be beautiful, if not convenient, I have a haunting suspicion when we 'figure out' all things gravity, things will turn assymetrical very fast.
The Higgs should be renamed the Cow Particle, because it's outstanding in its field.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
computer says "yes"
paid pundits, shills, and feds say "what the fuck is this AC talking about?"
AlternatingCurrent/DirectCurrent is not a music group, although the AC/DC "current" (River by some definitions) can be used to access your computer, keeping tabs on your hot-mic recording of you singing Michael Jackson in the shower, to make sure it "complies" with ACTA/SOPA.....
-Squeeky Clean
I mean: good enough for me, a software engineer, who does not have to toy around with the actual equations and who does neither have to set up nor perform the actual experiments...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
tries to explain theory.
There are lots of misconceptions Symmetry, for example, does not prevent divergences.Divergences are still present although in a controllable way. That's what renormalization and the renormalization group is all about. If a symmetry is broken through quantum mechanical processes then the breaking can lead to new divergences which turn out to be uncontrollable if they do not follow a certain patterns. The symmetry leads to a conserved quantity and a current following the basic rule that the amount of current goes in determines the change in the conserved quantity ( charge ). In the case of QCD, for example, the charge is color ( red,blue.green. The pattern need to control the divergences caused by quantum color violations is that the sum of the current leakage has to equal zero.
This essentially says that quarks have to appear in pairs to cancel charge violations. So once a bottom quark was seen, there had to be a top quark.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the Higgs mechanism though.
The Higgs mechanism is based on the fact symmetry depends on two things. The laws of motion and the initial conditions. I can take a puck on a smooth surface and push in any direction and the motion will look the same. That's because the laws of motion and the initial conditions both obey a symmetry. If I replace the smooth surface with one with random bumps the motion will not look the same in all directions. The laws of motion are still the same in each direction, but the inital conditions no longer are. That's the Higgs mechanism at it's crudest.
What the fuck does that even mean?
I think that at those ultimate levels, this distinction is quite fuzzy for all the reality in general.
I first read the comic strip, found it great, I thought I gained a deep understanding, and then I read the informative /. comments here and now I do not find it so great and I'm almost as confused as before....
Being pedantic here, but the summary is slightly wrong. The comic strip's name is "PHD comics", where PHD = Piled Higher and Deeper. It's obviously a play on Ph.D., but facts are facts.
A comic strip about sub-atomic particles and not one POW! or KERRRR-SPLAT!!! And no one developed any superpowers at all. Colour me disappointed.
No left turn unstoned.
The comic is a nice attempt to communicate complex theories. But the comparison of the usefulness of the Higgs boson and the electron is a bit of propoganda from high energy physics that is very very unlikely to be true. The electron has a rich variety of quantum states that allow bonding between atoms which is the basis of materials, biology, and information processing. Energy scales of these bonds are in the eV range, just a little above room temperature so their dynamics are very accessible in ordinary situations. As far as we know, electrons don't decay. Contrast with the Higgs. The only known excitation of the Higgs field is the recently detected particle which can only be detected using a massive particle collider, lives for 10^-22 seconds, and is at an energy scale billions of times room temperature. The only use of the Higgs (beyond providing theoretical consistency) is to allow calculation of the masses of some particles...which is nice, but for practical purposes we could just use the known measured masses of the approximately 15 particles just as well. In short, there is no rational reason to expect technology based on our knowledge about the Higgs boson. There is a metaphysical belief out there that all science leads to technology. Some clearly has. But the claim that all science leads to technology requires some reasons beyond propaganda. If anyone has an idea what to do with a Higgs, please suggest it. Or if you know of an application where knowledge of the properties of the Higgs is required for engineering calculations, please let us know. I suspect it will matter in a tiny way eventually. Eventually, someone will be measuring quantum states to 20 digits and the Higgs corrections might come in to matter in a tiny way...but it will be nothing like the practical relevance of the electron.
ok, for what it's worth, my take on what the higgs is, is that it's a [virtual] ultra-heavy proton, made up of the same [previously undiscovered] ultra-heavy quarks that make up the [virtual] W and Z Bosons. it takes a bit of explaining, but i've been looking into this... a lot.... and i surmise that the W and Z Bosons are just flavours of pions (2-quark particles) whilst the Higgs is just a flavour of the proton (3 quark particles). they don't appear "in the wild" so to speak because a) they're incredibly large b) they're hugely unstable, *but* in "virtual" form they're actually very easy to create (universe-speaking)
what's interesting is that there _should_ also be a "neutral" Higgs as well - based on an ultra-heavy neutron. hey look! there's two mass figures for the Higgs, and one of them was gamma ray decay particles only! and what's the difference between the 126.0 / 125.3 and mass of neutron divided by mass of proton? exactly the same to within 0.05%. funny that. .... the only problem is: i now need about 10 years worth of full-time maths training in order to catch up with the level of mathematics that's gone into QED in order to *prove* the above to the satisfaction of the rest of the particle physics community.... and that, essentially, is the whole problem with particle physics. the direction it's taken is so immensely complex that the number of people who can contribute successfully is vastly limited: thus, progress in this field isn't limited by computers or people's enthusiasm for the subject but by the direction that it's taken.
from a software engineering and reverse-engineering perspective, pure maths like this simply doesn't have the kind of "rapid prototyping" loop that allows progress to be efficiently made. each mathematical construct is an "ivory tower", where the smallest theoretical modification or tweak can require the entire edifice to be redesigned from the ground up (taking man-decades of intense thought in the process).
so - think of this: considered as a computer program, how could anyone "debug" the process by which particle physics has evolved?
"without the higgs field, there would be no mass terms in the equations"
*sigh*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor_(physics)
or any one of dozens of other theories that likewise generate mass using alternate methods. Yes, I am aware that none of them have been terribly successful, but they haven't been terribly popular either - and that's often the difference.
Yeah that would be something. Rock and roll and physics are certainly not mutually exclusive. So for example Feynman sure pounded a mean bongo. And Brian Cox actually was a professional musician.
Would that be Brian May?
Both.
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_%28physicist%29: "In the 1980s he was keyboard player with the rock band Dare [ref: http://women.timesonline.co.uk... newspaper= The Times 24 February 2008]
Apparently something about naming English blokes "Brian".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe the problem isn't molasses but the notion of symmetry. As even the comic states, without symmetry, the equations become infinite to describe the universe. The reality we know is that we have to keep adding more equations (or particles or plains, all of which are defined by equations), to try and explain the universe. Some postulate that we will never have enough equations to fully explain the universe, which by definition implies that the sought after symmetry doesn't exist. An added benefit to not having symmetry is that one doesn't have to explain how the physics changed in the very early universe.
What is easier to grasp, the lack of symmetry or some external force had to cause the early particles to change? Theists probably like that notion, but for many it is unacceptable.
The comic seems to hint at a relationship between he two. Is that correct? Do different values of the higgs field make for different speeds of light?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
... expected Brian May.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
The next step is figuring out the dimensions of the field and how the three or four fields interact. I will give you a clue. When matter moves through the fields it needs to be in 2.6 fields at one time. Understanding TIME is the key to it. Nothing to see here, move along.