• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Higgs Boson Discovered?!

a_unique_person said:
An 'explanation' of mass said that there are Higgs Bosons everywhere, creating the Higgs field that creates mass. However, the Higgs Boson has an incredibly short life span, before it 'transmutates' into other particles.

How does that work?
Click to expand...
It doesn't. The Higgs mechanism is said to do be responsible for mass, but take a look at A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC. It’s by Gian Francesco Giudice, a CERN physicist. There's a search-inside on Amazon. If you search on Higgs sector you can read pages 173 through 175. He starts by saying: “The most inappropriate name ever given to the Higgs boson is 'The God particle'. The name gives the impression that the Higgs boson is the central particle of the Standard Model, governing its structure. But this is very far from the truth.” He also says the Higgs mechanism is “the toilet” of the standard model, and is “frightfully ad-hoc”. On page 174 he says: “It is sometimes said that the discovery of the Higgs boson will explain the mystery of the origin of mass. This statement requires a good deal of qualification.” He ends up saying “In summary, the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2 per cent of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass.”

The CERN press office don't correct the garbage you read because it suits them if you think this is something more important than it is. E=mc² is responsible for mass. If you heat a container of gas, you increase its mass. If you trap a massless photon in a box, you increase the mass of the system.
 
Farsight:
It's sad. First you make a very reasonable statement, while quoting Francesco Giudice's reasoned comments. Then conclude with the absurd comment that "E = mc2 is responsible for mass." An equation is responsible for mass? Energy is responsible for mass? Does that comment have any meaning? Is sinθ1/sinθ2= n responsible for refraction?
 
a_unique_person said:
Is it the field that creates the bosons? I thought that the particles, like the electron, created the field.
Click to expand...

There's a sense in which the background Higgs field is a collection of Higgs particles in a Bose condensate. But it's probably better to think of it as a sort of aether, except that it's an aether that has no rest frame (i.e. it looks the same to all observers, regardless of their state of motion).

The Higgs particles that LHC produced are like excitations (waves, or ripples) of that aether. They decay quickly to other particles.
 
xtifr said:
But GR doesn't explain any of those things either (with the possible exception of dark energy). It seems to me that all of those (with the possible exception of the matter/antimatter imbalance) are outside the domain of the standard model. And yes, we'll need a new model at some point to explain all that, but then we'll most likely need a quantum gravity model to supercede GR at some point as well, and GR may need some adjustments to deal with dark energy.

There's a difference, in my mind at least, between being incomplete and being incorrect. GR and the standard model both seem incomplete to me (the degree isn't so much of an issue--incomplete is incomplete), but both seem to be basically confirmed now within their domains.
Click to expand...

The difference is that GR doesn't try to explain any of those things. GR is basically a theory of gravity and motion. It says nothing whatsoever about what things might exist to obey its rules, it just says what those rules are. The standard model, on the other hand, is basically a theory that tells us what particles should exist. Dark matter is presumed to be made of particles, but the SM tells us there shouldn't be any more particles left. Gravity is often presumed (or at least hoped) to behave similarly to the other forces and therefore be described as a field with associated particles, but the SM just can't do it. Matter/anti-matter imbalance is a big one, because that's exactly the sort of thing all the symmetries and symmetry breaking should predict, but we just can't get a prediction that matches the amounts we actually see.

The standard model simply doesn't predict, or gets badly wrong, many of the things that it absolutely should predict. It's not a question of not quite being complete or not giving answers to things it's not designed to answer, it's just very much a broken theory that can't deal with many of the big questions in particle physics. It's good enough to be fairly useful up to a point, but it goes way past the "might need a bit of refining in extreme cases" of something like GR.

a_unique_person said:
Is it the field that creates the bosons? I thought that the particles, like the electron, created the field.

Is the Higgs field like some kind of aether?
Click to expand...

See here. The standard model is a field theory. The Higgs field is nothing special, it's just one of many fields that make up the theory. It's no more aether than electromagnetism or the strong force.
 
The big guy puts things in context:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/06/god-great-job-on-finding-my-particle.html

First off, they’re all My particles, OK? I made every last one of them, from the hunky handsome proton to the waifish, Starbucks-named neutrino. So when you attach My name only to the Higgs boson you insult the decillions of quarks, leptons, gluons, and all the other “little particles” without whose hard work and collaborative spirit the universe would cease to exist, at least with the same brio.
Click to expand...

Off topic, but funny.
 
higgsflowchart.jpg


That makes me feel better. :)
 
Cuddles said:
The difference is that GR doesn't try to explain any of those things. GR is basically a theory of gravity and motion. It says nothing whatsoever about what things might exist to obey its rules, it just says what those rules are. The standard model, on the other hand, is basically a theory that tells us what particles should exist. Dark matter is presumed to be made of particles, but the SM tells us there shouldn't be any more particles left. Gravity is often presumed (or at least hoped) to behave similarly to the other forces and therefore be described as a field with associated particles, but the SM just can't do it. Matter/anti-matter imbalance is a big one, because that's exactly the sort of thing all the symmetries and symmetry breaking should predict, but we just can't get a prediction that matches the amounts we actually see.

The standard model simply doesn't predict, or gets badly wrong, many of the things that it absolutely should predict. It's not a question of not quite being complete or not giving answers to things it's not designed to answer, it's just very much a broken theory that can't deal with many of the big questions in particle physics. It's good enough to be fairly useful up to a point, but it goes way past the "might need a bit of refining in extreme cases" of something like GR.



See here. The standard model is a field theory. The Higgs field is nothing special, it's just one of many fields that make up the theory. It's no more aether than electromagnetism or the strong force.
Click to expand...

If we don't know what dark matter is, maybe it is one of the existing particles? Could gravity be explained with the existing set of particles, but we just don't know it yet? Do we call Newtonian physics a failure because it doesn't include relativity, or was it just an iteration in our progress of advancing knowledge?
 
lionking said:
Isn't that the postulated graviton? I would like to know the progress in discovering this particle.
Click to expand...

We can invent the name "graviton", we can say "to explain gravity it has to be massless, spin-2 and couple to mass", and ... well, things sort of peter out there. There's no single coherent theory of the graviton, not like there is for Higgs or photon or gluon interactions.

Insofar as we can guess what the graviton's properties are, no one is searching for it. It's utterly inaccessible to experiments as far as I know.

Interestingly, there *are* sensible hypotheses which combine supersymmetry---an extension of the Standard Model---with gravity, generally in a string-theory context. In these theories, the graviton has a stable, heavy superpartner, called the gravitino, which might be amenable to searches at the LHC, and could be a component of the dark matter.
 
Can anyone answer another lay person's question in lay language: I'm reading now that the "measurements seem to diverge slightly from what would be expected". Having only the vaguest clue why drag matters, I can't make sense of the Net explanations on just what differs and why it matters.
 
I'm sure that everyone here has been waiting with bated breath for Deepak Chopra to weigh in on the significance of the Higgs boson. So without further ado:



;)
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Can anyone answer another lay person's question in lay language: I'm reading now that the "measurements seem to diverge slightly from what would be expected". Having only the vaguest clue why drag matters, I can't make sense of the Net explanations on just what differs and why it matters.
Click to expand...

"drag"?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom