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How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#51

Post by cryptonector »

hinkley wrote: post #23

Imagine some preindustrial scientist being awakened in the modern era to find that the aether has been first debunked for more than a century and then rediscovered, but with different rules.

It's not an aether... I mean, aether was a crutch, but the mathematics that Lorentz developed simplified and you just don't need aether -- it's enough to assume that there's a maximum speed of light and the relativity principle.

(Well, that's only true if you assume there's no as-yet undiscovered fields and particles with FTL that we could eventually interact with -- then we would be able to get something like measurements of speeds of everyday particles and photons relative to such fields, and if they were much faster than light then those measurements would look like "absolute speed" to us. But that's sci-fi fantasy.)

Higgs is not aether for electromagnetic waves. It's only a wee bit like aether for matter if you squint real hard, but still, it's not a medium of travel for matter, so it's not an aether.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#52

Post by LegitShady »

pdonis wrote: post #46
LegitShady wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the entire theory of the higgs field and its discovery came from understanding that the model without it lacked sufficient gravity to match the world around us. So I understand what you're saying, I disagree that we don't know how these to relate to each other. The reason Peter Higgs theorized the higgs field is because we have some idea of it.Maybe it gets more complicated than we understand currently, but we unders…

> the entire theory of the higgs field and its discovery came from understanding that the model without it lacked sufficient gravity to match the world around us. No, it didn't. Mass is not required for gravity; only energy is. The energy was there before the electroweak phase transition; it just wasn't in the form of rest mass. It still produced gravity.

The end of the electroweak epoch is estimated at 10^-12 seconds after the big bang. So while I understand that something existed prior to the universe as we understand it now, for the overwhelming majority of the existence of reality we have lived in a reality after the electroweak phase transition, and the universe we live in today and the features we recognize of it are a result of forces including the effect of the higgs field on mass and thus gravity.

So you're right technically, but it has nothing to do with what I said in my first comment - without the higgs field the universe as we know it today would be unrecognizable, and a universe without a higgs field would not look like ours.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#53

Post by cryptonector »

seiferteric wrote: post #13
bloopernova wrote: post #2

Layman trying to wrap my head around this: the Higgs field causes other fields to stiffen by giving them a resonant frequency, with higher frequencies meaning more mass.

Hmm, now this is making me think, does the Higgs field act like an additional degree of freedom for energy to be dumped into? I mean like a photon is massless, so any amount of energy, it will already be going the speed of light so the only place where additional energy to go into is the frequency. Perhaps with massive particles, a portion of this additional energy now gets dumped into this resonant frequency rather…

It's potential energy (m_0 c^2), but in a way it's also kinetic because it is a moving wave, it's just that it's a standing wave so it's as though it's reflecting, but being a standing wave causes that part of the particle's bundle of energy to manifest as potential energy.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#54

Post by cryptonector »

throw0101d wrote: post #17

> Quantum field theory, the powerful framework of modern particle physics, says the universe is filled with fields. Examples include the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field and the Higgs field itself. For each field, there’s a corresponding type of particle, best understood as a little ripple in that field. The electromagnetic field’s ripples are light waves, and its gentlest ripples are the particles of l…

Fields aren't made of anything. When you feel static electricity, like when you rub a balloon against your hair, and your hair then stands up, that electric charge on the balloon and your hair is somehow being made evident across the space between the hair and the balloon. That communication of force electric charge happens over the electric (really, electromagnetic) field. It happens across air and vacuum alike. Nothing need be between the charged objects and yet the charge will be "felt" by them. That "field" is just the numeric electric charge felt at each point in space, for all points in space. It's just field strength -- a bunch of scalar values, one for every point in in space. We call that a field, but it's not an object made of stuff, just a mathematical object.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#55

Post by ISL »

Zondartul wrote: post #33
hinkley wrote: post #23

Imagine some preindustrial scientist being awakened in the modern era to find that the aether has been first debunked for more than a century and then rediscovered, but with different rules.

Rule #1 of talking about the aether is "don't call it aether". Nowadays it's "spacetime this" and "mass-energy tensor that" and "properties of vacuum something else".... and we still end up with empty space behaving like a funky fluid.

The aether originally suggested a preferred reference frame -- something thoroughly debunked by tests of special relativity.

The universe could still have various preferred/interesting frames (the CMB's rest-frame sure is interesting), but it won't have much, if anything, to do with the movement of particles or light.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#56

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

Zondartul wrote: post #33
hinkley wrote: post #23

Imagine some preindustrial scientist being awakened in the modern era to find that the aether has been first debunked for more than a century and then rediscovered, but with different rules.

Rule #1 of talking about the aether is "don't call it aether". Nowadays it's "spacetime this" and "mass-energy tensor that" and "properties of vacuum something else".... and we still end up with empty space behaving like a funky fluid.

Notably, though, unlike an aether, none of those things have a measurable rest frame.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#57

Post by benreesman »

svachalek wrote: post #27
throw0101d wrote: post #19

> Once upon a time, there came into being a universe. Searingly hot, it swarmed with elementary particles. Among its fields was a Higgs field, initially switched off. But as the universe expanded and cooled, the Higgs field suddenly switched on, developing a nonzero strength. Any particular reason/mechanism why the Higgs field suddenly (gradually?) switched on?

It is believed to be the cooling of the universe. At ridiculously high temperatures, such that have not existed since the first fraction of a second of the universe, the electroweak symmetry was broken and most physics we are familiar with didn't work. Unfortunately the math behind it is way over my head so that's about all I can say on it.

Not a physicist, just a fan. As far as I understand it, we believe that it was in the early universe that the symmetry was unbroken [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction#After_...

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#58

Post by criddell »

halyconWays wrote: post #40
emrah wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aether has a specific definition and it still does not exist. It was not rediscovered. QFT is not aether-like. Aether was a substance filling all space, while QFT fields like higgs are not physical at all (but rather give rise to physical properties)

> while QFT fields like higgs are not physical at all Phew, I feel better now. Non-physical scalar and tensor fields permeating all of expanding spacetime in a non-physical manner give rise to physical behavior via local nonphysical wavefunction collapse that we call excitations.

That's why the mathematical universe hypothesis (everything is built from mathematical structures) seems likely to me.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#59

Post by oezi »

halyconWays wrote: post #41
oezi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the fields are just the mathematical representation of the respective force carrier particles travelling through space. Such particles (the photon is certainly the most relevant for us) are having such a big size due to their statistical nature that the fill space even though their own size when probed is tiny.

Particles don't actually exist, however. They're excitations in various fields. A proton, for example, is actually a sea of three quarks of different "colors" that continually exchange energy (and only have potential positions) via gluons, and those quarks and gluons themselves aren't particles, but excitations in fields

So we have a duality of fields and particles. Likely it doesn't make sense to give one representation precedence over the other.

Re: How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles

#60

Post by Sniffnoy »

sieste wrote: post #39

> A common approach has been to tell a tall tale. Here’s one version: There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As particles move through it, the soup slows them down, and that’s how particles get mass. Is that really so? I've never heard this analogy, so the whole premise seems a bit of a straw man...

I've seen it a bunch, FWIW.
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