Higgs Boson Discovered?!

[edd]

This really is crazy. Photons do not trap themselves in self-made boxes. Photons do not couple directly to photons. QED is in complete agreement with all two-photon physics. Electrons are not made up internally of photons, and photons are in no meaningful way made up purely of kinetic energy.

To follow your logic Farsight, photons can't be fundamental since they also have spin angular momentum, so presumably there's something smaller going round and round in them too?

Your idea makes no useful predictions, unlike the Higgs mechanism. The Higgs mechanism also does not violate relativity (you'd have thought someone might have mentioned that when they found the Higgs if it did, no?)

 

[ben m]

So the electron is made out of the same thing that makes an electron move. Kinetic energy. This is what E=mc² is all about.

See above. Matter is made of energy. That's the whole point of E=mc².

As usual, Farsight can't tell the difference between "explaining Relativity" and "explaining his crackpot mental image of Relativity".

You really seem to think that energy is the underlying "stuff", and that if you rearrange and recombine energy in different ways you get different "stuff". Tie up some energy like this, and you get an electron at rest; tie it up like that, you get a top quark moving at 0.5c. This is wrong---or, at least, this is not what Einstein or anybody else thought.

Energy is a conserved quantity. You can measure it. Different things add up to different amounts of energy. The rest mass of a down quark is worth 5 MeV in this conservation law---that does not mean that "5MeV" worth of "energy blobs" are its building blocks. The field energy of the 1-fm sphere of gluons, found inside a proton, is worth about 900 MeV. The rest mass of an electron is worth 0.511 MeV---that does NOT, emphatically, mean that you build a proton by balling up 0.511 MeV of energy-substance. Energy isn't a substance, isn't a building block, isn't a thing at all. Rest mass has this conserved quantity, energy, as an attribute. High velocities have this energy-quantity as an attribute. Strong fields have this energy-quantity as an attribute. That's as far as it goes. That is the whole point of E=mc^2 --- it tells you what quantity of energy is associated with mass at rest. It does not tell you that one is a constituent of the other.

(ETA: Indeed, Einstein's derivation of E=mc^2 has nothing whatsoever to do with substances. That derivation is *pure* kinematics---you starts with "let's assume that energy is conserved", and you run some inelastic-collision experiments in different frames. You discover that E = 1/2 mv^2 is *not* a conserved quantity, but E = sqrt(m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2) is a conserved quantity. This derivation does not care about electrons, or photons, or pair production, or fields---it's just the definition of the conservation law.)

All of your assertions revolve around a stupid reinterpretation of words like "contains", etc.. Imagine listening to someone discussing their assets: "I sank $150,000 into my house, and my car is $10,000, and I have $8000 in gold bullion under my mattress." And imagine a crackpot thinking that this literally means that you could pick the car apart under a microscope and find the $150,000 it's made of; that smashing the gold together really hard will reveal a cunning work of dollar-bill origami. It will get worse when the crackpot sees an broker advertising that he can convert gold into money and vice versa (you're ignoring evidence, morons, says the crackpot), and a bank talking about the "liquidity" of assets (see, money is a substance! Everyone knows but you! says the crackpot.)

That is just as stupid as your electron = kinetic energy assertion, Farsight.

 

[Farsight]

Testing, one two:

 

[Farsight]

This really is crazy. Photons do not trap themselves in self-made boxes. Photons do not couple directly to photons.

Yes they do couple directly. It's called two-photon physics. SLAC have done the experiments. And go and read Light bends itself into an arc. What do you think's going to happen if that arc is so very curved that it forms a closed path?

QED is in complete agreement with all two-photon physics.

Not the bit that says pair production occurs because pair production occurs, and that a photon is forever spontaneously morphing into an electron-positron pair all on its own. That's crazy. All you need to do is look at Faraday rotation and understand that a photon is an electromagnetic wave to understand that a photon can couple to a photon. Two photons pass each other, jinkjink, jinkjink.

Electrons are not made up internally of photons, and photons are in no meaningful way made up purely of kinetic energy.

Oh yes they are. You really can convert a photon into electron kinetic energy and nothing else. And you really can convert two photons into an electron and a positron and nothing else. You really can convert an electron and a positron into two photons and nothing else. Do not dismiss the scientific evidence of Compton scattering, the photoelectric effect, electron diffraction, magnetic dipole moment, the Einstein de-Haas effect, and what Einstein said in favour of something for which there is no evidence, and which fails miserably at explaining why "the Higgs boson" doesn't get its mass from all the kinetic energy we gave the LHC protons.

To follow your logic Farsight, photons can't be fundamental since they also have spin angular momentum, so presumably there's something smaller going round and round in them too?

No. Don't put words in my mouth. Photons are waves, waves are always associated with angular momentum. Look at wind waves. See the pictures on the right. A wave makes things go round.

Your idea makes no useful predictions, unlike the Higgs mechanism.

It isn't my idea, it's Einstein's idea. The inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. That's what it depends on, not whether it couples with cosmic treacle.

The Higgs mechanism also does not violate relativity (you'd have thought someone might have mentioned that when they found the Higgs if it did, no?)

You'd have thought they'd have mentioned that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter when they found the Higgs. But they didn't did they? No. Nor did they mention that it's "frightfully ad-hoc" and isn't central to the Standard Model. And nor did they mention the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. And nor did they mention that it gets it mass from all that proton kinetic energy. So what's your fallback argument edd? That the Higgs mechanism must be right because the people trumpeting it don't mention these things? Wake up. This is a forum for skeptics, for rational thinkers, not for suckers who lap up publicity releases and treat it like gospel.

 

[Farsight]

So I go to the supermarket and buy dinner. My bank account diminishes as a result. Therefore my dinner is made out of money??

No. And if you buy your dinner with paper money it isn't made out of paper either. Your dinner is made out of energy captured by plants from the sun and used to construct starch etc from materials at hand such as CO2 and water. With a bit of plant material that was eaten by things called animals and reprocessed into something called meat.

The lhc is powered by electricity, some of which comes from hydroelectricity, therefore the Higgs boson is made of gravitational potential energy

And gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy when a brick falls down. And before the brick fell down, that gravitational potential energy was in the brick as hidden kinetic energy wherein the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. Find a brick made of antimatter and you can annihilate the elevated brick and antibrick to photons, which can be entirely converted into electron motion. So again, the "Higgs boson" is made of kinetic energy.

So that's where baby photons come from?

Risible, Clinger. You've got nothing, and you know it. You can't put up a rational argument backed by scientific evidence to counter mine, and it shows.

 

[Perpetual Student]

So explain it then
Perpetual Student, explain the Higgs paper in your own words. When you can't, it will be a nice demonstration of Emperors' New Clothes. Cue ducking and diving and a few more outraged "crackpot" squawks. Bah.

Now I really must go.

I don't know why I'm taking the bait here. I have had such negative experiences in the past with a certain Mozina when I have done so -- I will likely regret this. My own (layman's) words for a mathematically developed argument in such a complex area of physics are mostly pointless. But anyway here goes:

As a starting point (not shown in the paper in question), an analysis of a certain Lagrangian of a complex scalar field constructed to be symmetric under phase transformations shows that the spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry generates massless scalars (bosons), which cannot really exist in nature. (I assume you understand why this is so.) The Higgs mechanism solves this problem through a coupling mechanism that I believe is similar to that of fermions (that couple with their anti-particles -- but maybe not?) in order to account for mass. However, a gauge field is postulated to accomplish that for bosons having mass. His equation (4) contains the coupling constant that does the trick.
So, now explain where the errors are in his thesis. You have the floor! No more silly comments about photons being kinetic energy in space -- just tell us where Higgs went wrong!

 

[Tubbythin]

No, I meant electron. We can turn a photon into electron kinetic energy. Or we can turn a photon into an electron (and a positron) in pair production. So we can say the electron is made of kinetic energy.

No, no we can't. This is just the high-school version of the first law of thermodynamics, nothing more.

 

[Farsight]

Perpetual Student: Huh? LOL! Call that an explanation? You don't understand this at all! What complex scalar field? What does constructed to be symmetric under phase transformations actually mean? And how does the "spontaneous" breaking of a continuous symmetry generate massless bosons? All you've done is had a stab at an explanation that "explains" things in terms of things you don't understand at all. Why do you fool yourself that abstract blather like this is in any way convincing, whilst at the same time fooling yourself into thinking that patent scientific evidence is silly?

Higgs went wrong because he didn't understand classical electromagnetism and four-potential. The A-field is what "bulges" when a photon passes by, that's what's responsible for both photon momentum and electron mass, that's the "Higgs substance" that doesn't fill space, but is space. And he didn't understand the symmetry between momentum and inertia either. Or the wave nature of matter. Or the Einstein-de Haas effect, or electron diffraction, etc etc etc. And yet he's revered like a gospel saint by people like you who have never read the original Einstein and don't understand the first thing about physics. Ye Gods.

 

[dafydd]

Testing, one two:

[qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?K_0 - K_1 = \frac{1}{2} \frac{L}{C^2} v^2[/qimg]

Wow, you can count to two!

 

[dafydd]

For those interested in the truth, here is the BBC documentary about the Higgs Boson.

 

[edd]

Yes they do couple directly. It's called two-photon physics.

Not direct coupling.

Not the bit that says pair production occurs because pair production occurs, and that a photon is forever spontaneously morphing into an electron-positron pair all on its own. That's crazy.

"One does not simply dismiss QED." - Niels Bohromir.

No. Don't put words in my mouth. Photons are waves, waves are always associated with angular momentum.

I just... the... what?

You'd have thought they'd have mentioned that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter when they found the Higgs. But they didn't did they? No.

Plenty of people did. Admittedly not many press offices did, but that's what press offices are like.

That the Higgs mechanism must be right because the people trumpeting it don't mention these things? Wake up. This is a forum for skeptics, for rational thinkers, not for suckers who lap up publicity releases and treat it like gospel.

I tend not to do my physics by press releases. I tend to have more direct routes to it. I think it's incredibly likely to be right because of its explanatory power and because a suitable looking particle just showed up.

 

[Farsight]

As usual, Farsight can't tell the difference between "explaining Relativity" and "explaining his crackpot mental image of Relativity".

As usual, you've got no counterargument and resort to abuse.

You really seem to think that energy is the underlying "stuff", and that if you rearrange and recombine energy in different ways you get different "stuff". Tie up some energy like this, and you get an electron at rest; tie it up like that, you get a top quark moving at 0.5c. This is wrong---or, at least, this is not what Einstein or anybody else thought.

It isn't "stuff". Stuff is made of it. And it was Einstein who told us that matter is made of energy.

Energy is a conserved quantity.

Yep. And matter is made from it.

You can measure it. Different things add up to different amounts of energy. The rest mass of a down quark is worth 5 MeV in this conservation law---that does not mean that "5MeV" worth of "energy blobs" are its building blocks.

Can you show me a down quark? No. But I can show you energy. KICK. That's energy. I can show you Compton scattering. KICK. The electron moves and the photon is diminished. I can show you pair production, and now there's no KICK, just an electron and a positron. Learn to put evidence and reality above abstraction ben. You're an experimentalist aren't you? Act like one.

The field energy of the 1-fm sphere of gluons, found inside a proton, is worth about 900 MeV.]

Gluons are virtual particles. See above. Next.

The rest mass of an electron is worth 0.511 MeV---that does NOT, emphatically, mean that you build a proton by balling up 0.511 MeV of energy-substance. Energy isn't a substance, isn't a building block, isn't a thing at all.

Oh yes it is a thing. It isn't stuff, but it's the thing from which stuff is made. It's the thing from which matter is made. It's the thing that you can neither create nor destroy. It isn't some abstract thing like money that is merely a tokenised agreement of value. It's real ben. Plants capture it. You consume it to do work and to grow. It isn't just the capacity to do work. Not when work is the energy associated with the action of a force. How many circular arguments do I have to point out to you before you start thinking for yourself?

Rest mass has this conserved quantity, energy, as an attribute.

Because it's just energy that is effectively at rest because it isn't getting anywhere, because it's going round and round instead of linearly. That's it, that's all it is. Do you still not understand this symmetry between momentum and inertia? A wave propagating linearly exhibits resistance to change-in-motion called momentum, a wave propagating circularly exhibits resistance to change-in-motion called inertia. Hence the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. Can I even put it any simpler?

High velocities have this energy-quantity as an attribute. Strong fields have this energy-quantity as an attribute.

And is there anything that doesn't? Photons? No. Neutrinos? No. Electrons and positrons? No. Protons and antiprotons? No. Neutrons and antineutrons that decay into the above? No. Fast moving electrons made to move fast by photons? No. How about a gravitational field? No? And so it goes ben.

That's as far as it goes. That is the whole point of E=mc^2 --- it tells you what quantity of energy is associated with mass at rest. It does not tell you that one is a constituent of the other.

No, the experiments tell you that. And you're an experimentalist.

(ETA: Indeed, Einstein's derivation of E=mc^2 has nothing whatsoever to do with substances. That derivation is *pure* kinematics---you starts with "let's assume that energy is conserved", and you run some inelastic-collision experiments in different frames. You discover that E = 1/2 mv^2 is *not* a conserved quantity, but E = sqrt(m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2) is a conserved quantity. This derivation does not care about electrons, or photons, or pair production, or fields---it's just the definition of the conservation law.)

Pay attention to that "pure kinematics", because you are made of it. And when it comes to

, do not ignore the flipflop between the mass and momentum terms in pair production followed by annihilation.

All of your assertions revolve around a stupid reinterpretation of words like "contains", etc.. Imagine listening to someone discussing their assets: "I sank $150,000 into my house, and my car is $10,000, and I have $8000 in gold bullion under my mattress." And imagine a crackpot thinking that this literally means that you could pick the car apart under a microscope and find the $150,000 it's made of; that smashing the gold together really hard will reveal a cunning work of dollar-bill origami. It will get worse when the crackpot sees an broker advertising that he can convert gold into money and vice versa (you're ignoring evidence, morons, says the crackpot), and a bank talking about the "liquidity" of assets (see, money is a substance! Everyone knows but you! says the crackpot.)

Breach of rules 0 and 12 removed. Do not insult other posters.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[Roboramma]

And gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy when a brick falls down. And before the brick fell down, that gravitational potential energy was in the brick as hidden kinetic energy wherein the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. Find a brick made of antimatter and you can annihilate the elevated brick and antibrick to photons, which can be entirely converted into electron motion. So again, the "Higgs boson" is made of kinetic energy.

I forgot that you somehow consider kinetic energy to be more fundamental than other forms of energy

Personally I think ben m's most recent post in this thread sums up my objections to this better than I'm likely to

But just to be clear: you're saying that a book sitting on shelf five feet off the floor in my bedroom has more kinetic energy than the same book sitting on the floor?

 

[dafydd]

Edited by LashL: 

Edited.

<sound of irony meters exploding>

 

[W.D.Clinger]

All you've done is had a stab at an explanation that "explains" things in terms of things you don't understand at all. Why do you fool yourself that abstract blather like this is in any way convincing, whilst at the same time fooling yourself into thinking that patent scientific evidence is silly?

Excellent question. You should ask it more often, in front of a mirror.

Higgs went wrong because he didn't understand classical electromagnetism and four-potential.

Oh, this is gonna be good...

The A-field is what "bulges" when a photon passes by, that's what's responsible for both photon momentum and electron mass, that's the "Higgs substance" that doesn't fill space, but is space.

If that doesn't demonstrate Farsight's superior understanding of classical electromagnetism and four-potential, then I don't know what does.

And yet he's revered like a gospel saint by people like you who have never read the original Einstein and don't understand the first thing about physics. Ye Gods.

In a discussion of Einstein's most important paper on general relativity, Farsight got lost at the third of 75 numbered equations. While promoting his book, Farsight demonstrated profound ignorance of freshman-level electromagnetism.

Why does Farsight continue to remind us of that history by accusing others of not having read Einstein and not understanding the first thing about physics?

Maybe he thinks it's one of his more compelling arguments.

 

[edd]

Your physics knowledge is scant.

I assure you it isn't - his knowledge is clear enough to anyone, especially other physicists. I don't think I really need to bother saying this for anyone else reading it, but you're only making yourself look foolish by making this sort of statement about others.

 

[Tubbythin]

Take that up with Einstein, who said: "The kinetic energy of the body with respect to (ξ ɳ Ϛ) diminishes as a result of the emission of light".

That's the first law of thermodynamics.

Then take a look at electron-positron annihilation. The kinetic energy of the body diminished as a result of the emission of light.

That's the first law of thermodynamics.

Totally. And afterwards, there's no body left.

There are two photons. Are they not bodies?

Not when that "body" is a photon. It isn't some billiard-ball thing. It's got a wavelength. It's a wave.

Light has wavelike properties.

When you take all the kinetic energy out of that wave, it doesn't exist any more.

The photon has 0 chemical potential. We've known that since 1905 (at a guess).

Like I was saying you can convert the photon kinetic energy into electron kinetic energy, whereafter there is no photon.

That's the first law of thermodynamics.

Or you can convert it into an electron (and a positron).

That's the first law of thermodynamics too... combined with the conservation of electron lepton number of course.

That's why we have the phrase "matter is made of energy". What else do you think it's made from? Cheese?

Mass has an equivalent energy content, hence E=mc².

No it isn't. grey is a colour, it's a quale, something that only exists inside our heads. It's how we perceive light of a given frequency.

It is a mix of frequencies.

Energy isn't like that, it's the one thing you can neither create nor destroy.

Like I said, that's the first law of thermodynamics.

Matter really is made of energy.

Define "energy".

And that "Higgs boson" was quite literally made of the kinetic energy that we put in.

You're still not understanding the first law of thermodynamics.

I haven't backed down. Edd made the point, you hitched a ride on it.

The two posts were made at exactly the same time.

And blow me Sherlock, that photon doesn't exist any more. Take its kinetic energy away, and it isn't just sitting there. It's gone. That's why it is kinetic energy.

You really don't understand the idea of energy do you? It is a scalar quantity. Just like, I dunno, distance. If the distance from one end of an elephant to the other is 5 m it makes no meaningful sense to say that the elephant is actually 5 m. Not 5 m long. Actually 5 m. Meaningless. Just like the photon being made of kinetic energy.

And you can make matter out of it.

Yay. Gotta love the first law of thermodynamics.

You can't point out where I'm wrong, all you can do is go into denial and resort to dissmissal and abuse. I'm with Einstein here Tubby. Don't forget that.

No, no you're not. Einstein pointed out that the first law of thermodynamics required the mass-energy equivalence. You think energy is actually a thing like an elephant.

Spoken like a creationist.

Nope. Spoken like someone telling the truth.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Perpetual Student: Huh? LOL! Call that an explanation? You don't understand this at all! What complex scalar field? What does constructed to be symmetric under phase transformations actually mean?

So, you are admitting that you do not understand what a complex scalar field is? You do not understand what it means for a complex function to be symmetric under phase transformations? And -- you actually believe you are qualified to say anything about particle physics?

And how does the "spontaneous" breaking of a continuous symmetry generate massless bosons? All you've done is had a stab at an explanation that "explains" things in terms of things you don't understand at all. Why do you fool yourself that abstract blather like this is in any way convincing, whilst at the same time fooling yourself into thinking that patent scientific evidence is silly?

I have made it quite clear that my knowledge of physics is lacking -- but not so lacking for mathematics. There exists a term in the Lagrangian that is massless (along with one that has mass) which is the reason the breaking of symmetry generates massless particles. If you really do understand the physics involved here, you can tell us all why this is wrong.

Higgs went wrong because he didn't understand classical electromagnetism and four-potential. The A-field is what "bulges" when a photon passes by, that's what's responsible for both photon momentum and electron mass, that's the "Higgs substance" that doesn't fill space, but is space. And he didn't understand the symmetry between momentum and inertia either. Or the wave nature of matter. Or the Einstein-de Haas effect, or electron diffraction, etc etc etc. And yet he's revered like a gospel saint by people like you who have never read the original Einstein and don't understand the first thing about physics. Ye Gods.

So, you actually believe Higgs did not understand electromagnetism, the wave nature of matter, electron diffraction, etc.? WHAT HUBRIS!!! Why do you keep on muttering about the symmetry between inertia and momentum, photons are kinetic energy in space and other delusional baloney?
When you can explain what the spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry means and tell us why the explanation above is not correct we can proceed. In the meantime, buy yourself a pointed hat with crescent moons and stars painted on it and sell your ignorant rants elsewhere. No one here is buying your make-believe physics.

 

[Farsight]

I think it's incredibly likely to be right because of its explanatory power and because a suitable looking particle just showed up.

Can you explain why what I've said is wrong? No. Can you explain why the inertia of a body does not depend upon its energy content? No. Can you explain why Einstein was wrong? No. And can you explain that Higgs paper? No.

Edd, take a tip from Feynman. Pay attention to this: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool" You can't explain why I'm wrong and you can't explain why you're right. It must be right because it can't be wrong doesn't cut it. And nore does "crazy". What kind of argument is that? One that dismisses patent scientific evidence and plain-vanilla physics? In favour of something you don't understand and cannot explain, but lap up regardless? You know Feynman was called The Great Explainer? I look up to the guy, and try to emulate him. Now go listen to what he said about cargo-cult science, and pay attention. The ultimate irony of all this is that his QED has been corrupted into saying pair production occurs because pair production occurs, and damn the evidence, to hell with SLAC, dismiss light bends itself into an arc, photons do not couple with photons, QED. One day the penny will drop Edd. But on this day, I'm off to bed.

ETA: LOL, Perpetual Student, Emperors New Clothes it is. Abusive words like "ignorant" and "rant" and "make-believe" do not conceal it.

 

[Tubbythin]

It isn't "stuff". Stuff is made of it. And it was Einstein who told us that matter is made of energy.

Einstein told us that matter has an equivalent energy content.
Energy is a scalar quantity, like mass. Say you weigh 100 kg. Does that mean you are made of 100 kg? No, that is not a meaningful sentence. Nor is it a meaningful sentence to say you are made of 1m 96 cm. Your body temperature is about 37 degrees C but you are not made of 37 degrees C. And in exactly the same way, you are not made of a billion gigajoules.