Higgs Boson Discovered?!

[Tubbythin]

Uhhhhn. Tubby. You know what makes me laugh at JREF? A guy like you makes a mistake that a physicist would spot immediately. But nobody points it out. Nobody says sorry Tubby, that's back to front. When your physics knowledge improves, you'll start to notice this kind of thing, and then you'll come to appreciate that people here aren't being straight with you.

It's not back to front. It's entirely the right way around. As you might see if you were to answer my questions about sweets.

 

[smartcooky]

Just a complete, possibly ignorant, layman's perspective here. Now I might be understanding the theory of how a Higgs Field is supposed to work completely incorrectly here, but AIUI, it goes something like this....

Shortly after the Big Bang, all particles in the universe had zero mass (and presumably, huge amounts of kinetic energy), and they whizzed around the universe at c. Then the Higgs Field came along (somehow?) impeded their motion to something less than c, and in so doing gave the particles mass.

According to the history I have read, Albert Einstein died in 1955, and Peter Higgs did not develop the Higgs Field Theory until 1964.

Is it remotely possible that Einstein didn't say "the inertia of a body depends upon its interaction with the Higgs field" simply because he had no concept of a Higgs Field Theory in the first place, and that he made the statement the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content" because it was the best fit to the observations available in his time?

It does not seem to me that Einstein's statement is incompatible with the idea of a Higgs Field giving particles mass, since the action of the Higgs Field in impeding the movement of particles surely must diminish their kinetic energy, and turn some of its energy into mass - E=mc²
I liken it to Kepler... who worked out that the planets moved in ellipses, but couldn't understand why, because Isaac Newton hadn't arrived yet to discover gravity.

 

[Tubbythin]

Not so. It's all about converting matter into energy and vice versa. If you don't believe me, go ask the question somewhere else. Nobody will even mention the first law of thermodynamics.

Nobody will ever mention the first law of thermodynamics because iit is implictly obvious. I take it you've never done any particle physics courses where you have to calculate the kinetic energy of an outgoing particle in a reaction?

Energy and momentum aren't two different things. They're just two different aspects of the same thing.

They are two different, related, things.

Think of a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s. Try stopping it in a second. You exert a constant opposing force. In the first tenth of a second it pushes you back a long way. In the next tenth it pushes you back a lesser distance, and so on. After 0.5 seconds the distance you've gone is less than the distance you're going to go. That's where the KE=½mv² comes from.

KE=½mv² comes from the low energy approximation 0f E=γmc².

There's an integral in it, and it's a way of describing the stopping distance for a given force applied to a given "mass" moving at a given speed. Momentum however is a force x time measure. After 0.5 seconds you're halfway through the stopping time, so it's a linear p=mv. They're two different measures of something very real, not two different abstract quantities conserved by the invariant laws of physics. And like I said, it's called energy-momentum for a reason.

They most very definitely are two measures of different quantities conserved by the laws of physics. Einstein was very explicit about this. He called the discoverer of this fact: "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began".

 

[Tubbythin]

It does not seem to me that Einstein's statement is incompatible with the idea of a Higgs Field giving particles mass, since the action of the Higgs Field in impeding the movement of particles surely must diminish their kinetic energy, and turn some of it into energy into mass - E=mc²

The Higgs field determines the mass of the fundamental particles. The mass of the particles determines how much kinetic energy needs to be taken out of a system to create that particle.

 

[edd]

I don't think it's quite how you think early on smartcookie, plus Einstein even if he'd been aware of the Highs mechanism wouldn't say what you suggest as most mass is not derived from it.

 

[Tubbythin]

A photon is a wave that travels linearly through space at c. But when that wave goes round and round at c, we don't call it a photon any more.

A photon is a quantum of light. It is the particle part of the wave-particle duality of light.

Yes it does. You can diffract these things. They're all waves. But they aren't all waves that travel linearly through space at c.

So?

I don't do magic Tubby. I do plain vanilla. If you want me to explain it, start a thread.

You do a great line pompousness.

Because they do cease to exist. And instead an electron moves, either linearly through space, or up to the next orbital. And in an orbital, electrons "exist as standing waves". Don't you get it yet? Electrons exist as standing waves full stop.

I know they cease to exist. That doesn't mean they are made of energy any more than they are made of momentum, spin or helicity.

Yep. And rest mass is just a measure of energy content. So what's that "Higgs boson" made of?

The Higgs boson isn't made of anything (to the best of our knowledge). It is a fundamental particle, just like the electron, muon, tauon, three corresponding types of neutrino, antiparticles of all the preceding, gluon, photon, Z⁰, W⁺ and W^-.

No Tubby. Mass is just a measure of energy content. Temperature is just a measure of average kinetic energy. Momentum is just energy divided by c. It's real. And it's the only thing that is.

Momentum is certainly not just energy divided by c. The rest is just a wild claim with no basis in reality.

 

[smartcooky]

The Higgs field determines the mass of the fundamental particles. The mass of the particles determines how much kinetic energy needs to be taken out of a system to create that particle.

I don't think it's quite how you think early on smartcookie, plus Einstein even if he'd been aware of the Highs mechanism wouldn't say what you suggest as most mass is not derived from it.

So, I'm treating this too simplistically?

 

[Tubbythin]

The bottom line is that the Higgs boson contradicts Einstein and his E=mc².

Nope. That is not the bottom line. The bottom line is that we have a crackpot, who is struggling with the first law of thermodynamics, telling us that entirety of the particle physics community is wrong because he and he alone understands the true words of Einstein whilst simultaneously dismissing the work of the person Einstein explicitly described as "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began".

 

[Perpetual Student]

Disclaimer: I am not a physicist.


Me too. Toward that end, I suggest we go through the Higgs paper sentence by sentence and equation by equation, asking for help as needed from our resident physicists.

First sentence:




I'm sure that's clear enough for the physicists, but I had to go looking for some background information on Goldstone's theorem and spontaneous symmetry breaking. I found this:

Tomáš Brauner. Spontaneous symmetry breaking and Nambu-Goldstone Bosons in quantum many-body systems. Symmetry 2010, 2, pages 609-657. doi:10.3390/sym2020609
http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/2/2/609/pdf​

Before I study that paper in more detail, here's a question for the physicists: Would that relatively non-technical 49-page tutorial help me to understand the first sentence of the Higgs paper?

(Note: I'm not asking whether it would help Farsight. I'm asking whether it would help me.)

I found this little essay helpful: LINK

 

[Farsight]

Are you really unaware of the difference between relativistic mass and rest mass?

No. I understand mass like the back of my hand. Rest mass, relativistic mass, active gravitational mass, passive gravitational mass, inertial mass, invariant mass, you name it.

The inertia of a body depends on its relativistic mass, not its rest mass.

The inertia of body depends upon its energy content. How many times do I have to say it?

which means they have non-zero inertia even when they are not moving. They then have more inertia when they are moving, because their relativistic mass (the m in E=mc²) is greater.

Wrong. The given expression is

. That doesn't quite get to the bottom of things, but no matter, the important point is that the m in E=mc² is rest mass, not relativistic mass.

Likewise they have non-zero energy even when they are not moving, which of course is why nuclear reactions can convert rest mass to kinetic energy.

And vice versa, wherein kinetic energy in the guise of a photon is given as E=hf, the momentum being p=hf/c. In pair production we start with a photon which has no mass term m, and we end up with an electron and a positron which do. If we say they aren't moving there's no momentum term p. After annihilation there is but there's no mass term m. There's a flipflop between mass and momentum.

There is no conflict here between E=mc² and the Higgs mechanism. Your claim that there is appears to amount to the misconception that the m in E=mc² refers to the rest mass of a particle, rather than the relativistic mass.

It refers to rest mass, and I await other posters here to back me up on that. Meanwhile go ask elsewhere about it.

I assume you meant "the inertia of a body depends on its energy content" above. The problem is that you appear to be operating under the misconception that this is somehow incompatible with the Higgs mechanism.

It's no misconception. Either the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content, or it doesn't. It either depends upon the energy content of that body, or on something else, such as interaction with a field that pervades all of space. If you plump for the latter, you've just said Einstein was wrong.

No, the photon always has exactly one unit of angular momentum.

E=hf doesn't say that. It says the photon energy is always a constant of action multiplied by frequency. It's like I call out "Lights camera action!" and you start winding the handle on an old-style movie camera. There's a pen sticking out of the handle drawing a sine wave on a moving scroll of paper. Regardless of how fast you wind the handle, regardless of your frequency, the pen always draws a sine wave the same height. Go look at some pictures of the electromagnetic spectrum. See how the waves are the same height? That's no accidedent.

It is a spin 1 particle. Do you understand what that means?

Of course I do. It's an aspect of symmetry. To keep it simple, a spin ½ particle looks the same when you rotate it 720 degrees, a spin 1 particle looks the same when you rotate it 360 degrees, a spin 2 particle looks the same when you rotate it 180 degrees. Would you like me to talk further about this to you vis-a-vis electrons, virtual photons, and gravitons?

It's angular momentum can change direction, but it can never be zero.

When that photon energy has gone, the angular momentum has gone, and the photon has gone too.

Yes, I know. But I didn't say "momentum". I said "angular momentum".

So? Angular momentum has the same dimensionality as action. Action has the dimensionality of momentum x distance.

Now, classically angular momentum is also associated with rotational kinetic energy. But that isn't the case for a photon. The photon's total energy is proportional to its linear momentum. The angular momentum is the same regardless of its total energy. Taking energy away doesn't reduce its angular momentum. A photon with incredibly tiny total energy still has just as much angular momentum as a super high-energy gamma photon.

No it doesn't. Go look at wind waves. See the circular motion in the pictures on the right? Now think back to that old-style movie camera. You wind that handle and a sine wave is drawn on the moving scroll. If you wind that handle a billion times a second the angular momentum isn't the same as when you wind it once a second.

You can't remove all the energy-momentum without also absorbing that 1 unit of angular momentum.

Like I said, the scattered electrons form a spiral starburst pattern, draw a circle with tangents with arrowheads.

You can't absorb that 1 unit of angular momentum without also absorbing the photon (that is, you can't have a photon with zero angular momentum). The photon is not a wave (at least, not in the classical sense that you are suggesting).

Yes it is. It's a transverse wave in space. Waves are sinusoidal. Sine waves are always associated with circular motion. Look it up.

Nor is it a particle in the classical sense of the term. Nor is it both. Nor is it sometimes one and sometimes the other. It is a quantum mechanical object which exhibits some behavior which is very similar to a classical wave under some conditions, some behavior which is very similar to a classical particle under other conditions, and some behavior which is utterly unlike anything classical under all conditions.

It's a wave. Not magic. Take a look at Jeff Lundeen's web page and Aphraim Steinberg's web page. These guys (plus teams) have used weak measurement to plot the photon wavefunction. That's wave function, not billiard-ball function. And it's something real, right there in the lab, not just some abstract thing associated with the probability of finding a point particle. The days of quantum mysticism are in the past.

And so to bed.

 

[Roboramma]

Yes. It isn't obvious, and it's called gravitational potential energy. But when you knock the book off the shelf the book falls down, and now that kinetic energy is obvious. When you lift the book back up to the shelf you do work on it, and add energy to it, and as a result its mass increases. Only a little. But conservation of energy ought to tell you that it does increase. It's a little like heating an object. If you could annihilate the book on the shelf with an anti-book and carefully measure the kinetic energy releases in all the gamma photons, you would find that more kinetic energy was released than a similar gedankenexperiment at floor level. I'm not kidding you about this. If you'd like to start a thread on it I'll go into it in more detail.

Farsight, I'm aware of all that: a book on a shelf has more energy than one on the floor

That doesn't mean that it has more kinetic energy than one on the floor

The fact that it's possible to convert energy from one form to another doesn't mean that it had "hidden kinetic energy" all along, it simply means that energy is conserved

 

[Tubbythin]

And vice versa, wherein kinetic energy in the guise of a photon is given as E=hf, the momentum being p=hf/c. In pair production we start with a photon which has no mass term m, and we end up with an electron and a positron which do. If we say they aren't moving there's no momentum term p. After annihilation there is but there's no mass term m. There's a flipflop between mass and momentum.

Nope. Momentum is conserved. That is why pair production does not happen at 2m_ec². There is no "flip-flop" between mass and momentum.

It's no misconception. Either the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content, or it doesn't. It either depends upon the energy content of that body, or on something else, such as interaction with a field that pervades all of space. If you plump for the latter, you've just said Einstein was wrong.

The mass of a fundamental particle is determined by the interaction with the Higgs field. The amount of energy it takes to make that particle is equal to its mass times c². There is no conflict there whatsoever.

When that photon energy has gone, the angular momentum has gone, and the photon has gone too.

When the photon has gone, its energy and angular momentum have been transferred to other objects.

Yes it is. It's a transverse wave in space. Waves are sinusoidal. Sine waves are always associated with circular motion.

No they're not. I hang a weight from a spring, stretch the spring and let go and the displacement from the equilibrium position is sinusoidal (at least to first approximation). That is a sine wave associated with linear motion.

 

[edd]

That doesn't quite get to the bottom of things, but no matter, the important point is that the m in E=mc² is rest mass, not relativistic mass.

I'd agree that this is the usual way to take that formula.

And vice versa, wherein kinetic energy in the guise of a photon is given as E=hf, the momentum being p=hf/c. In pair production we start with a photon which has no mass term m, and we end up with an electron and a positron which do. If we say they aren't moving there's no momentum term p. After annihilation there is but there's no mass term m. There's a flipflop between mass and momentum.

E=hf doesn't say that.

Of course not. It patently says absolutely diddly about angular momentum.

You appear to continue to be mistaken about waves generally and angular motion and circular motion. Plenty of waves exhibit neither.

 

[TjW]

His 1905 E=mc² paper Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content? Here's an excerpt from it:

"The kinetic energy of the body with respect to (ξ ɳ Ϛ) diminishes as a result of the emission of light, and the amount of diminution is independent of the properties of the body. Moreover, the difference K0 − K1, like the kinetic energy of the electron (§ 10), depends on the velocity.

Neglecting magnitudes of fourth and higher orders we may place

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

From this equation it directly follows that:—

If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c². The fact that the energy withdrawn from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no difference, so that we are led to the more general conclusion that

The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content; if the energy changes by L, the mass changes in the same sense by L/9 × 10²°, the energy being measured in ergs, and the mass in grammes."

I bolded the important bit. It's unequivocal. The mass of a body depends upon its energy content, not on its interaction with the Higgs field. The bottom line is that the Higgs boson contradicts Einstein and his E=mc². Scarey. Ask around and see if you can find out how the Higgs boson gets its mass. Make sure you mention that the only ingredients in the LHC are protons and the kinetic energy given to them as they were accelerated around the ring.

Yep, it's unequivocal. Is a measure of. Not Is made of. Just as the length of a body is a measure of its extent in that dimension.

 

[Mister Earl]

Pardon my arm-chair-science intrusion, but I'm confused. The Higgs is the particle that gives other particles mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Correct? And the Higgs particle has mass. ... So the Higgs has a Higgs? Does that sub-Higgs have a sub-sub Higgs? How far down does the stack of turtles go?

*brain asplodes*

 

[edd]

No Mister Earl. Basically the Higgs itself is allowed to just have a mass with no help.

 

[Farsight]

Once again, Farsight is attempting to derail a discussion of physics in order to promote his Relativity+. This is getting seriously annoying...

...I would like to appeal to the moderators to help get this discussion back on track.

I'm only promoting the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content, and this is no derail. The thread was dead, Tubby bumped it in post 231 on page 6, I asked if he wanted me to explain why the Higgs mechanism contradicted Einstein's E=mc², he said yes, and here we are. I've given a solid argument backed by empirical scientific evidence referring back to Einstein's 1905 paper. You've offered no counterargument, and calling for censorship instead doesn't go down too well. This is a skeptics forum where we discuss things rationally, we don't just accept what we're told. When we challenge what we're told and make a robust case against it, we don't expect to be shut up. Especially when we're talking about physics. If that's how you like to operate, you might find the Catholic church more to your liking.

 

[Farsight]

You say there is a photon/electron* interaction not modelled well by QED? I'm calling your bluff. Spell it out.

*you are permitted to replace all electrons by photons in attempting to do this.

I've already made this clear enough, but I'll reiterate it. The photon/photon interaction is not modelled well in QED. In the wikipedia two-photon physics article you can read this:

"From quantum electrodynamics it can be found that photons cannot couple directly to each other, since they carry no charge, but they can interact through higher-order processes. A photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion-antifermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple."

If ben were to get a laser beam and put it through a magnetic field to deflect any spontaneously-created electrons and positrons into say cloud chambers, he will not find any. He will thus deduce that this aspect of the model is offering a calculation method rather than a true reflection of reality. Then when he arranges two laser beams as per SLAC and does detect electrons and positrons, he knows that they're the result of a photon-photon interaction. He will then hopefully realise that his former understanding, wherein pair production occurs because a photon spontaneously magically morphs into an electron-positron pair, which the other photon interacts with, was wrong. He will hopefully then understand that pair production occurs because pair production occurs is circular reasoning and bad science.

The moral of the tale is that in physics, experiment trumps mathematics. You believe what the experiments tell you, you don't disbelieve what the experiments tell you because you believe in the maths instead. Especially when you're an experimentalist. The whole point of it is to advance scientific knowledge, not dismiss evidence that doesn't square with what you were taught as a kid.

 

[Tubbythin]

The moral of the tale is that in physics, experiment trumps mathematics. You believe what the experiments tell you, you don't disbelieve what the experiments tell you because you believe in the maths instead.

Erm. You do realise it is you that is claiming that the most precisely tested theory in the history of science is wrong?

 

[smartcooky]

Pardon my arm-chair-science intrusion, but I'm confused. The Higgs is the particle that gives other particles mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Correct? And the Higgs particle has mass. ... So the Higgs has a Higgs? Does that sub-Higgs have a sub-sub Higgs? How far down does the stack of turtles go?

*brain asplodes*

No Mister Earl. Basically the Higgs itself is allowed to just have a mass with no help.

Probably why it sometimes gets called the "God particle"