Higgs Boson Discovered?!

[smartcooky]

E = hf whilst momentum p = hf/c. Hence momentum p=E/c.

So Farsight has confirmed, using his own words, that his interpretation fails at the level of eighth-grade algebra.

Proposition:

E = hf
p = hf/c

∴
p = E/c

Looks right to me, but lets test it using simple numerical substitution:

h = 3
f = 4
c = 300

E = hf ∴ E = 3 x 4 ∴ E = 12 √

p = hf/c ∴ p = (3 x 4) / 300 ∴ p = 0.04 √

so

p = E/c ∴ p = 12/300 ∴ p = 0.04 √


Still looks right to me.

 

[Farsight]

Wow. Dude, you've forgotten (or maybe you didn't read) what I clearly outlined here...

Have you even bothered to do this calculation yet? Incidentally, the first person to do this very calculation was... you guessed it... Einstein!

As I said before, these are some pretty elementary mistakes you're making, Farsight. Unless and until you acknowledge these errors and show us some working math to back up your ideas, instead of butchering and misrepresenting Einstein's work, I'm guessing that you will continue to bat zero here.

I'm not batting zero, you are because you didn't spot that I referred to

in post post 430 on page 11 and in in post 473 on page 12. Wow dude, missing that is a bit of a howler, what? Then claiming I'm making elementary mistakes and butchering and misrepresenting Einstein, without any kind of backup, just isn''t going to cut it.

Next!

 

[Farsight]

Experiment says that it costs 511keV to make an electron, yes. But the claim that the Higgs is responsible is anything but "unscientific".

It is when it contradicts E=mc². What Einstein said is the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. Not some measure of whether that body interacts with the Higgs field. Now go and read the paper. See the line that says If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies. In pair production the original massless photon/s conveys inertia. So the inertia of an electron at rest doesn't come from some interaction with the Higgs field. It came from the energy used to make that body. And so again, the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content.

What do you think science is? It's coming up with theories to try to explain experiment, and then testing them.

And then when they're proved to be correct, we don't just dream up some other theory that contradicts them.

And that's precisely what the Higgs mechanism is - it's a theory to explain where that 511keV comes from

It doesn't explain where that 511keV comes from. We already know it came from the photon.

and like all good theories, it makes a bunch of other predictions too. One of them is the prediction that the Higgs particles exists, and that it has certain very specific properties and interactions. That prediction looks like it has now been confirmed.

It wasn't a specific prediction at all. Higgs did not predict that we'd find a particle with a mass of 125Gev. There was an opportunistic "prediction" that you read about here. Also don't forget that Higgs' paper was initially rejected as being unscientific, and he tacked on a vague prediction to get it past peer-review.

And the theory - correct or not - is 100% consistent with E=mc^2.

See above. And can you explain that theory? No.

Again, it's not an assumption - it's a theory, one which may or may not be correct, but which is manifestly scientific because it makes testable predictions.

OK, list 'em. And while you're thinking about it, I'll give you a theory: At the quantum level, the world is made up of fairies beating their wings. The existence of these fairies mean we can expect to discover a particle that last for no time flat and has a very large mass. Capiche? When we discover a bump on a graph, have we proved the existence of fairies?

No, I don't have it wrong. In the standard model, the electron's mass comes from the electron's Yukawa coupling to the Higgs field.

The Yukawa interaction was used to describe the residual strong force between protons and neutrons via virtual pions. And see wikipedia which says An obvious possibility is some kind of "Yukawa coupling". So it isn't a certainty, is it? It's an assumption, like in RC's link.

strong nuclear force between nucleons (which are fermions), mediated by pions (which are pseudoscalar mesons).

Yes I know that. The Yakuwa interaction describes a fermion-fermion interaction, the strength of which varies with distance. A bit different to fermion mass, isn' t it? And how convenient that fermion mass just happens to always tie in with energy-content.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Yes, in some sense the main role of the Higgs is not to account for fermion masses - it's to spontaneously break electroweak symmetry, and hence provide masses for the W and Z bosons.

We'll be having a good old look at them sometime.

And it's also true that in general, one can write down masses for fermions without a Higgs.

Good.

But, in the standard model the left-handed particles have different gauge transformations than right-handed particles. An ordinary (non-Higgs) mass for the electron requires a coupling between the left and right-handed electron - but that's not gauge invariant, and hence nonsense. Instead, you need the higgs field (which has the opposite gauge transform as the left-handed fermions) to combine them. When the higgs field is non-zero - i.e. when it's condensed - that's a mass. When it's zero, the mass is zero.

This is wrong sol. Mass is just "how much energy has no aggregate motion with respect to you". The configuration of this energy is something else. Time for tea. But meanwhile, thanks for talking physics.

 

[Farsight]

We see what you did there, Farsight. Yes, light waves often carry angular momentum, and individual photons always do. But waves in general are not always associated with angular momentum. Sound waves, for example, do not have intrinsic angular momentum. And you weren't only talking about light. Here's the full quote:

"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."

Saying "A wave makes things go round" makes as much sense as saying "A horse makes things go round". Admit your mistake and move on. Can you do that?

Yes no problem. I made a mistake. I was thinking of electromagnetic waves and other transverse waves such as wind waves. A longitudinal wave such as a sound wave exhibits only a back-and-forth motion. In mitigation: we aren't talking about sound waves here.

ETA:

If the Higgs field were zero, the Higgs "particle" would be a tachyon (a field with negative mass squared). That's why it condenses.

Uhhn, not tachyons and negative mass. Not when mass is a measure of system energy content. How much energy does that system have? Minus 511keV? And apologies, I've just realised that your "talking physics post" was address to Cuddles, not me. My mistake.

 

[ben m]

Seeing Higgs tau tau would nail it down.

Update: the word out of Kyoto is that CMS has now detected (at low confidence, null result excluded at 1.5 sigma) H->tau tau decay, at a rate consistent with the Standard Model prediction.

 

[Farsight]

This has been entertaining...in "the smartest man in the world just jumped out of the plane wearing my book pack" sort of way.

Try to talk physics, Clinger. Try to resist sniping from the sidelines.

Maybe you were trying to argue that energy is the same as scalar momentum multiplied by the speed of light. If so, we can repeat the above calculation to get this:

E² = m²c⁴ + E²

Unless you want to argue that every cannonball has zero mass, that interpretation doesn't work either.

Nope. Cannonballs don't have zero mass. They have non-zero mass, and when they're moving relative to you, they have momentum. That's why the expression is

.

In Farsight's own words, written a couple of days later, with my highlighting:

And like space and time, energy and momentum are merely two aspects of the same thing called energy-momentum. You always divide by c to go from one to the other, for example for a photon energy E = hf whilst momentum p = hf/c. Hence momentum p=E/c.

It's true Clinger. Photon energy is E=hf, photon momentum is p=hf/c, and if you trap that photon in a box, the mass it adds to the system is m=hf/c². Then if you move that box you say

.

So Farsight has confirmed, using his own words, that his interpretation fails at the level of eighth-grade algebra.

No. You've merely confirmed what you said in post post 415 on page 11. You're not a physicist. And that you're somewhat lacking in the sincerity department.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, it might be an idea if you mentioned this thread. You know. The one where you said "The LaTeX server doesn't appear to be working, and I don't think it's been working for several months now. Is there any possibility of getting that fixed?". You know LaTeX, it's this kind of thing:

.

Jesus H Christ. This is like cage-fighting with kids.

 

[Farsight]

I'm sorry, can you explain what that has to do with my comment? I didn't mention velocity, I was discussing speed.

Your comment was:

"Have to just add a voice in support of this comment. If you read Einstein's own book about his theory (aptly enough named "Relativity"), this is made clear. The basis of it lies in Lorentz invariance; that's the mathematical expression of his ideas on the constantsy of light speed. Thus, it's that invariance that leads to E=mc2. It's absolutely the issue.

What that has to do with your comment, is that Einstein changed his ideas when he moved on to general relativity. Here's what Einstein said again. I've corrected the translation of geschwindigkeit for you to make it plain:

1911: If we call the speed of light at the origin of co-ordinates cₒ, then the speed of light c at a place with the gravitation potential Φ will be given by the relation c = cₒ(1 + Φ/c²)
1912 : On the other hand I am of the view that the principle of the constancy of the speed of light can be maintained only insofar as one restricts oneself to spatio-temporal regions of constant gravitational potential.
1913: I arrived at the result that the speed of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the speed of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis.
1915: the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the speed of light is to be abandoned.
1916: In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the speed of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the speed of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust. But in reality this is not the case. We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g. of light).

Einstein started out with the constant speed of light when he did SR, but when he did GR, he scrapped it.

And just for fun, can you describe any actual, testible, functional difference between "the speed of light is measured to be constant" and "the speed of light is constant"?

Yep. Optical clocks run slower when they're lower. You can separate two optical clocks by a mere foot of vertical elevation, and you can see the bottom running slower than the other. All clocks "clock up" some kind of regular cyclic motion. Optical clocks don't use swinging pendulums or oscillating crystals. They use electromagnetic hyperfine transmissions which emit light. In essence, they use the motion of light.

 

[ben m]

20% random out-of-context quotes from Einstein and/or Google
20% explicitly nonsensical physics he's making up as he goes along
20% explicitly nonsensical physics he's cribbing from his crackpot book
20% flat insults to other posters' intelligence and education
20% boo-ya, come-at-me-bro crowing about how well he thinks he's doing

 

[Farsight]

Proposition:

E = hf
p = hf/c

∴
p = E/c

Looks right to me, but lets test it using simple numerical substitution:

h = 3
f = 4
c = 300

E = hf ∴ E = 3 x 4 ∴ E = 12 √

p = hf/c ∴ p = (3 x 4) / 300 ∴ p = 0.04 √

so

p = E/c ∴ p = 12/300 ∴ p = 0.04 √


Still looks right to me.

It is right, smartcooky. Clinger is just one of those guys who tries to bamboozle people and ends up shooting himself in the foot. Search google on E=hf -EHF. If you don't put the -EHF in you get all sorts of stuff you don't want.

 

[Farsight]

Oh, and ben's another one. Like he said in post 559, he's not a theorist, and he's out of his depth. So he's a naysayer instead.

 

[edd]

Oh, and ben's another one. Like he said in post 559, he's not a theorist, and he's out of his depth. So he's a naysayer instead.

Farsight... you're not even a physicist, let alone a theoretical physicist.

 

[edd]

Yes no problem. I made a mistake. I was thinking of electromagnetic waves and other transverse waves such as wind waves. A longitudinal wave such as a sound wave exhibits only a back-and-forth motion. In mitigation: we aren't talking about sound waves here.

So you'd like to commit to the statement that all transverse waves carry angular momentum now, rather than that all waves carry angular momentum?

Uhhn, not tachyons and negative mass. Not when mass is a measure of system energy content. How much energy does that system have? Minus 511keV? And apologies, I've just realised that your "talking physics post" was address to Cuddles, not me. My mistake.

Field, with negative mass squared not negative mass, in a hypothetical situation that doesn't apply to reality, and you might want to go away and check on the distinction between a tachyon and a tachyonic field.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Proposition:

E = hf
p = hf/c

∴
p = E/c

Looks right to me,

You're falling for Farsight's argument by equivocation. He uses massless photons to argue that energy is the same as momentum. He then assumes energy is the same as momentum when talking about cannonballs.

I'm not batting zero, you are because you didn't spot that I referred to [qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2[/qimg] in post post 430 on page 11 and in in post 473 on page 12. Wow dude, missing that is a bit of a howler, what? Then claiming I'm making elementary mistakes and butchering and misrepresenting Einstein, without any kind of backup, just isn''t going to cut it.

That equation in the image to which Farsight linked says energy isn't the same as or proportional to momentum when we're talking about cannonballs or other massive objects.

Nope. Cannonballs don't have zero mass. They have non-zero mass, and when they're moving relative to you, they have momentum. That's why the expression is [qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2[/qimg].

So Farsight was quite wrong to say energy is the same thing as momentum, and Farsight was quite wrong when he wrote "You always divide by c to go from one to the other".

You're not a physicist. And that you're somewhat lacking in the sincerity department.

Neither of us is a physicist.

Farsight, however, wrote this:

My physics knowledge far exceeds that of other posters here.

If that claim was sincere, Farsight is somewhat lacking in the reality department.

Getting back to smartcooky's complaint, he missed the word "always" in the text I highlighted, and he also missed the fact that Farsight began the paragraph containing the text I highlighted by talking about cannonballs. I'll quote the first part of that paragraph this time, again with my highlighting:

Now, Einstein's "special relativity" paper is On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, so it's important to look at moving bodies such as our cannonball in space. You exert a constant force to bring it to a halt. Then you say it pushed me quite a distance before I stopped it, and for quite a time too. When you use the force x distance measure you are talking about energy, and when you use the force x time measure you are talking about momentum. And like space and time, energy and momentum are merely two aspects of the same thing called energy-momentum. You always divide by c to go from one to the other,

The cannonball's mass is not zero, so Farsight can't just drop the first term of the energy equation when he says you "always divide by c to go from one to the other."

As I noted, Farsight's argument fails at the level of junior high school algebra.

 

[Roboramma]

I'm not batting zero, you are because you didn't spot that I referred to [qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2[/qimg] in post post 430 on page 11 and in in post 473 on page 12.

Referring to that equation in a previous post doesn't change the fact that it contradicts what you said in a later post

 

[Roboramma]

OK. But note that the kinetic energy came from the book's potential energy, not from the gravitational field.

What is "the book's potential energy" if not it's interaction with the gravitational field? If the field were not present, there'd be no potential energy, and the potential energy is dependent upon the book's position in the field

Robo, it doesn't gain any energy from the gravitational field. The falling book doesn't.

It gains kinetic energy from it's interaction with the field, of course, energy is conserved so the total energy remains the same, but so what? The book isn't moving, as it falls it accelerates, and it's kinetic energy increases What causes that acceleration? The interaction with the gravitational field

Nor does a "falling" photon. When a photon is high up, you measure its frequency using a clock. When its low down, you measure its frequency with a clock, but that clock is subject to greater gravitational time dilation, so you measure a higher frequency.

Position a detector 100 meters above your photon emiter, and you'll find that it's frequency is lower at the detector than when emitted, move the detector up another 100 meters and you'll find the frequency lower still What causes the frequency to change? Gravity

The book on the shelf comprises more energy than the one on the floor, because you did work on it lifting it up to the shelf. That work equates to extra energy, that is now in the book. So it weighs more. Not so much that you could actually measure it, but conservation of energy tells you its true.

Yep

KE=½mv² no problem, but we could replace that book with a photon in a box.

Why? You said the book has more kinetic energy on the shelf than on the floor Can you support that in the case of a book, or not?

 

[smartcooky]

You're falling for Farsight's argument by equivocation.

No, I'm just arguing that the formulae were mathematically valid as stated.

If E = hf and p = hf/c are valid, then p = E/c follows, unequivocally!

if A = xy and B = xy/n then B = A/n

These are in agreement. I would be interested to see any argument that state they aren't.

I literally cannot comment on the physics being argued. You are all miles over my head!!

 

[W.D.Clinger]

No, I'm just arguing that the formulae were mathematically valid as stated.

If E = hf and p = hf/c are valid, then p = E/c follows, unequivocally!

Those formulas describe the energy and momentum of photons. They do not describe the relationship between energy and momentum for cannonballs.

These are in agreement. I would be interested to see any argument that state they aren't.

Here you go:

ETA: Come to think of it, scalar quantities are seldom the same as vector quantities.

The quantities aren't, but they're just different aspects of energy-momentum, see wikipedia.

That Wikipedia article supports my point to the detriment of yours.

It takes momentum as a scalar quantity (the magnitude of vector momentum), but it doesn't say energy and momentum are exactly the same thing. In fact, the article includes several equations from which it is trivial to prove that energy and momentum aren't exactly the same thing. Here's the first of those equations:

E² = m²c⁴ + p²c²​

If the energy E were exactly the same thing as the scalar momentum p, then we could substitute one for the other in that equation:

E² = m²c⁴ + E²c²​

from which it would follow that the energy E is always the square root of m²c⁴/(1-c²), which would mean the cannonball's energy depends only upon its mass. Unless you want to argue that the cannonball's energy is independent of its velocity, its energy can't be exactly the same as its scalar momentum.

Maybe you were trying to argue that energy is the same as scalar momentum multiplied by the speed of light. If so, we can repeat the above calculation to get this:

E² = m²c⁴ + E²​

Unless you want to argue that every cannonball has zero mass, that interpretation doesn't work either.

When citing Wikipedia articles that refute your argument is the best you can do, your argument is laughable.

As everyone who knows anything about physics has been trying to tell you: Energy and momentum are related, but they aren't the same thing.

 

[sol invictus]

It is when it contradicts E=mc². What Einstein said is the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. Not some measure of whether that body interacts with the Higgs field.

You know what, Farsight? After reading pages and pages of this thread, I have no idea what you think it is about the Higgs mechanism that contradicts E-mc^2. Literally no idea. And I'm pretty sure the same goes for everyone else here.

It wasn't a specific prediction at all.

It's very specific. Among many others, one prediction is that the Higgs couples to fermions with a strength that's exactly proportional to their mass. That's quite easy to falsify - if it's wrong.

The Yakuwa interaction describes a fermion-fermion interaction, the strength of which varies with distance.

Not really, no.

A bit different to fermion mass, isn' t it?

Nope.

 

[sol invictus]

Yes no problem. I made a mistake. I was thinking of electromagnetic waves and other transverse waves such as wind waves. A longitudinal wave such as a sound wave exhibits only a back-and-forth motion. In mitigation: we aren't talking about sound waves here.

Oh really? Light waves always carry angular momentum, do they?

Uhhn, not tachyons and negative mass.

The mass is imaginary, not negative.

Not when mass is a measure of system energy content. How much energy does that system have? Minus 511keV?

Not negative, imaginary. The mass SQUARED is negative. Of course, you haven't a clue how to interpret that or what it could possibly mean. Which is a shame, because it's actually quite interesting.

It's fun to actually understand things, Farsight. That's what makes physics so fascinating - it's rarely what you expect. It's a shame you'll never get to experience that feeling.

 

[ben m]

You know what, Farsight? After reading pages and pages of this thread, I have no idea what you think it is about the Higgs mechanism that contradicts E-mc^2. Literally no idea. And I'm pretty sure the same goes for everyone else here.

I do. Farsight thinks E=mc^2 means all matter is "made of energy". When he sees "made of energy" he substitutes "made of photons", presumably thanks to various vague pop-science statements (like "matter and matter annihilate into pure energy") that he interprets to mean this. Therefore, he thinks that he's derived "mass comes from internal photons" from Pure Logical Rigor applied to E=mc^2. And, if E=mc^2 tells you what mass *is*, then the Higgs mechanism (which hypothesizes that it's not *that*) must not be Logical and/or Rigorous.

Hence the claim that there is a contradiction, without the ability to point it out. "There must be a mistake in there somewhere", Farsight thinks, "because if there were no mistakes, they would have concluded that mass is all trapped photons."

It's the first standard crackpot pathology identified by Wilfrid Hodges in one of my favorite papers: Bulletin of Symbolic Logic Volume 4, Number 1, March 1998, AN EDITOR RECALLS SOME HOPELESS PAPERS

§4. It was surprising how many of our authors failed to realise that to attack an argument, you must find something wrong in it. Several authors believed that you can avoid a proof by simply doing something else. ... The existence of a different argument that fails to reach Cantor’s conclusion tells us nothing about Cantor’s argument.