Higgs Boson Discovered?!

[edd]

Can you explain why what I've said is wrong? No.

There's no logic to it. You're making connections between things that don't have connections, and misunderstanding what needs explaining about the mass of certain fundamental particles.

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.

Do you realise I've not disagreed with either of those?

And can you explain that Higgs paper? No.

Not very well, no. It's not my particular area, but I get enough and have enough trust in colleagues that I find it overall convincing. I have zero trust in your grasp of physics however.

Edd, take a tip from Feynman.

Given what you say about his work and your misinterpretation of my and other's statements about two photon physics I'm quite happy to just shake my head in despair and let you go to bed.

 

[Tubbythin]

Can you explain why Einstein was wrong?

Nobody is saying Einstein was wrong (not on this anyway). You are erroneously claiming he would agree with you.

 

[Tubbythin]

Pay attention to that "pure kinematics", because you are made of it. And when it comes to [qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2[/qimg], do not ignore the flipflop between the mass and momentum terms in pair production followed by annihilation.

That's the first law of thermodynamics.

 

[Perpetual Student]

This is hilarious!
Farsight does not understand what a complex scalar field is. He does not understand the meaning of the breaking of a continuous symmetry. He does not understand what it means for a complex function to be symmetric under phase transformations, but he thinks he has something meaningful to say about particle physics and the Higgs mechanism. He believes Higgs did not understand electromagnetism, the wave nature of matter, elecron diffraction and more.
Hey FarNearsighted, get that pointy hat with the crescent moons and stars on it an wave your wand elsewhere. You have been exposed and embarrassed here -- go sell your snake-oil on the mysticism forum. What a joke!

 

[ben m]

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?

a) Because we know two-photon physics, we know extremely precisely that there is no light-light bound state. Go ahead, work it out. I'll wait. According to the laws of photon-photon interactions, write down the binding energy of a photon-photon bound state. There is no bound state.

In ordinary, nonrelativistic QM, there's is a standard (advanced) undergrad homework problem: find the ground state energy of an electron bound to a spherically-symmetric "square well" of finite depth. For shallow wells, there is no bound state. None. Zero. An electron can scatter off such a well, but never stick to it. Go ahead, learn QM and see for yourself. I'll wait.

Same with neutrinos. Neutrinos can scatter off one another---indeed, the weak force provides an attractive potential---but there's no neutrino-neutrino bound state.

I repeat: there is no light-light bound state. If you want to invent one, you're going to have to throw out the "two photon physics" you keep citing, because that physics tells you you're wrong.

b) You have misunderstood the "arc" paper to an absolutely comical extent. There is no light-light scattering in this paper; it's just a cleverly-constructed set of ordinary, noninteracting waves.

ETA:

These beams are the full vector solutions of Maxwell’s equation for shape-preserving accelerating beams. Moreover, in their scalar form, these beams are the exact solutions for nondispersive accelerating wave packets of the simple and most common wave equation describing time-harmonic waves. As such, the work pre- sented in this Letter has profound implications to almost any linear wave system in nature, ranging from sound waves and surface waves in fluids to many kinds of clas- sical waves. In this spirit, it is now clear that the phenome- non of accelerating waves is not the result of a specific unusual behavior of the Schro ̈dinger equation (which is equivalent to the paraxial wave equation), as one may think from reading the first paper pioneering this subject [17].

My bold. There's no light-light scattering (a nonlinear and non-Maxwell's equation phenomenon) in this paper.

 

[Reality Check]

Remember that what's actually been discovered is a bump on a graph, that Peter Higgs didn't say I predict a resonance at 125GeV, and we're calling this thing "the Higgs" for short..

The mass of the boson found at the LHC agrees with estimates of the mass of the Higgs boson so we call it the Higgs boson - well Duh!
Peter Higgs is not the only scientist in the world!
Higgs Boson
The 125 GeV/c² mass is a prediction from SUSY extensions to the Standard Model.
The Minimal Standard Model is valid up to Planck energy scales for a Higgs boson mass of 115 and 180 125 GeV/c².

 

[Reality Check]

... Einstein's explanation of mass...

Farsight: Citation please to Einstein's explanation of mass.

I do hope this is not E=mc² because that is not an explanation of mass. It is mass–energy equivalence.
But if it is:
Farsight: Citation please to Einstein's explanation of energy.
(could this be E=mc² !)

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight, what does relativistic mean

Farsight, what does relativistic mean?
First asked 4 November 2012

 

[Perpetual Student]

Farsight is comletely incapable of understandIng Higgs' 1964 paper. His pretend physics has been exposed for what it is.
Go ahead, Farsight -- prove me wrong. Explain the 1964 Higgs paper and point out the errors.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

I just wanted to pop in here because I noticed this particular nugget of "wisdom", and while most of this nonsense has been soundly refuted, I didn't see any direct response to it.

The photon has a wavelength, it's a wave, and when you take all the kinetic energy out of the wave it doesn't exist any more. It isn't like some cannonball where you steal all its kinetic energy and you've still got a cannonball. So you can say the photon is kinetic energy.

This is, of course, not true. The photon has spin. It has nonzero angular momentum. And it keeps that momentum no matter how close its energy gets to zero. So the notion that you could somehow drain the kinetic energy from a photon until none is left, is simply nonsensical. What you can do is absorb the photon. But then you absorb its angular momentum too, not just its kinetic energy.

I suppose you could amend the claim to say that a photon is made of kinetic energy and angular momentum, but at this point it becomes clear that this amounts to nothing more than saying that those are the properties a photon has.

 

[Farsight]

Not direct coupling.

Yes, direct coupling. QED doesn't model it, but it happens.

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

I'm not dismissing it. You're dismissing scientific evidence. A photon doesn't actually fluctuate into an electron and a positron. Pair production occurs because light interacts with light. It doesn't occur because pair production occurs!

"I just... the... what?

Yes, photons have a wavelength.

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

Show some examples.

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.

We're going round in circles edd.

 

[Farsight]

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

I don't actually.

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

The fact remains that the only things involved in the collisions were protons plus the kinetic energy they'd been given, which was far greater than the proton rest mass.

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?

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]

<sound of irony meters exploding>

You know, I smile when our "moderators" permit trollish behaviour and abuse, then single me out with a penalty for answering back. It's no way to moderate a physics discussion. Instead since it's me giving the scientific evidence and the the well-supported explanation, it hands me the moral high ground and brings JREF into disrepute.

OK, we're going to have new rules in this discussion hereon. Anybody who is abusive to me goes on my ignore list. If we get to the point where there's nobody left, the discussion is over.

 

[Farsight]

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

I did that six years ago Clinger.

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.

Do try to address the points in this discussion. Your attempts to discredit me do not conceal your inability to respond adequately to the subject at hand.

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?

Because it's true. The inertia of a body depends on its energy content. That's the first thing you have to understand here, and if you'd read Einstein and appreciated what he said, you'd be on my side in this debate.

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

It ought to be compelling. If you disgree with me when I say the inertia of a body depends on its energy content, you're disagreeing with Einstein too.

 

[Tubbythin]

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.

The extra energy a book has because of being off the ground isn't kinetic energy.

 

[ben m]

nybody who is abusive to me goes on my ignore list. If we get to the point where there's nobody left, the discussion is over.

Please consider this post abusive.

 

[Tubbythin]

You know, I smile when our "moderators" permit trollish behaviour and abuse, then single me out with a penalty for answering back. It's no way to moderate a physics discussion. Instead since it's me giving the scientific evidence and the the well-supported explanation, it hands me the moral high ground and brings JREF into disrepute.

You are not giving a well-supported explanation. This isn't me trolling by the way. This is just me informing you.

OK, we're going to have new rules in this discussion hereon.

You don't make the rules for this forum. yOu can choose to ignore people as you wish, of course, but the discussion is likely to continue on regardless.

Anybody who is abusive to me goes on my ignore list. If we get to the point where there's nobody left, the discussion is over.

How about you stop being abusive to everybody else?

 

[Tubbythin]

Because it's true. The inertia of a body depends on its energy content. That's the first thing you have to understand here, and if you'd read Einstein and appreciated what he said, you'd be on my side in this debate.

At what point - after how many experts have told you that your understanding of Einstein is incorrect - would you ever consider the possibility that your understanding of Einstein is incorrect?

 

[MattusMaximus]

Because it's true. The inertia of a body depends on its energy content. That's the first thing you have to understand here, and if you'd read Einstein and appreciated what he said, you'd be on my side in this debate.

It ought to be compelling. If you disgree with me when I say the inertia of a body depends on its energy content, you're disagreeing with Einstein too.

I know I'm late to the discussion, but humor me, folks.

Farsight, could you point out to me exactly what part of Einstein's work supports your claim?

 

[Farsight]

There are two photons. Are they not bodies?

No. They're waves travelling at c. Remember the inertia of a body depends upon its energy content. Photons have an energy content, but rest mass doesn't apply. You can't make a photon slow down by pushing against it.

Light has wavelike properties.

Light consists of waves. These have a quantum nature. The photon has a wavelength. It isn't a point-particle.

Mass has an equivalent energy content, hence E=mc²

No, mass is a measure, you mean matter.

It is a mix of frequencies.

Agreed.

Define "energy".

No. It will take me too long to justify the definition I give. If you're really sincere about understanding it start a new thread, ask what energy is, and I'll explain it to you step by step.

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

I understand it.

The two posts were made at exactly the same time.

No further comment.

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.

It isn't meaningless. What ingredients went into the LHC to make the "Higgs boson"? Just protons and kinetic energy. Your just like, I dunno distance is a straw man argument.

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.

I do. It's real. It's the one thing you can neither create nor destroy. You can make an electron move with it, or you can make an electron with it.