Higgs Boson Discovered?!

[sol invictus]

That's a circular non-answer. It "costs" 511keV to make an electron

There's nothing circular about it. According to the standard model with Higgs mechanism, it costs 511keV to make an electron only when the Higgs is condensed. If the Higgs is not condensed (i.e. there's no Higgs condensate around), it costs less than 511keV to make an electron. That's because the Higgs condensate interacts with the electron field in a particular way, and that's the sense in which the Higgs field is responsible for the mass of the electron.

Maybe you could try asking a question about the part you don't understand, instead of assuming you already know everything?

in a nutshell the Michelson-Morley experiment didn't find any evidence to support the existence of aether, and demonstrated that whichever direction you measured the speed of light, you always got the same answer....The Higgs mechanism totally disregards this, and proposes a Higgs substance instead. That's an aether, and it's totally at odds with SR. Sticking "relativistic" on the description just doesn't fix any of this.

Nope. The Higgs condensate is not an aether, at least not in the 19th century sense. It's Lorentz invariant (actually, it's more - it's Poincare invariant). It does not have a rest frame and it does not pick out a direction, so it's very much not like a normal medium. The speed of light is c in all directions in the presence of such a condensate, because it's Lorentz invariant.

 

[ben m]

and maybe not two antineutrinos?

i sure hope not!

 

[Mister Earl]

Now that I've had the time to get caught up, I feel retroactively silly about my previous question. But, hey. Learning has occured.

 

[MattusMaximus]

LOL, I've got maths A level, I did more maths at university when I did a Computer Science degree, and I've done maths tutoring up to A-level.

No, I'm not wasting my time boring everybody to death pandering to your attempt to distract attention away from the evidence and the logic.

I've reported your post. Do try to talk physics instead of being abusive.

Farsight, saying that you have A-level math skills and then refusing to prove those skills by outlining the math behind your ideas will do you no favors here.

As one of my old grad school professors (a theoretical physicist named Ephraim Fischbach) once told me: "There are plenty of physics 'theories' gathering dust because their proponents didn't want to show the math."

Please, show your math, as Sol requested.

 

[ben m]

As one of my old grad school professors (a theoretical physicist named Ephraim Fischbach) once told me: "There are plenty of physics 'theories' gathering dust because their proponents didn't want to show the math."

By the way, Ephraim Fischbach is practically the personification of the oft-repeated, crackpot-disproving statement: "real physicists are not afraid to look for evidence against the Standard Model"

 

[MattusMaximus]

Nope. That only works for massless particles.

Nope again. p=mv is the classical (ie non-relativistic) formula for mass. The relativistic formula is p=γmv.

Farsight, if you work through the math behind what Tubbythin is saying, you will find that the more general relationship between relativistic energy and momentum (neglecting the four-vector nature of momentum) comes out to:

E² = (pc)² + (mc²)²
which for massless particles, like photons, comes out to (m = 0)...

E = pc

No offense, but this is a pretty straightforward calculation requiring only a basic understanding of SR and some algebra. For someone claiming to be so well versed in SR, this isn't the kind of mistake you should be making.

 

[Tubbythin]

i sure hope not!

I was thinking of the theoretical neutrinoless double beta decay (which I've never really understood).

 

[ben m]

I was thinking of the theoretical neutrinoless double beta decay (which I've never really understood).

and I meant to reply : I hope neutrinoless decay occurs!

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

No it doesn't. It says that the rest mass of a body depends on the Higgs mechanism when that body is one of a certain type of fundamental particle (those that interact with the Higgs field).

And Einstein described the electron as a body. And said the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It depends upon its energy content, not on the Higgs mechanism. Ergo Higgs contradicts Einstein.

Einstein never said that the mass of a body doesn't depend on the Higgs mechanism. You did. Einstein also never said that the mass of a body cannot depend on how strongly that body interacts with various fields. One reason Einstein never said this is because he never had any evidence to support such a claim. Another reason he never said it is because he knew perfectly well that the energy content (and therefore the mass) of a body can and often does depend on how that body interacts with various other fields.

Again, there is nothing contradictory about saying that a body's mass is a measure of its energy content and that its mass depends on how it interacts with the Higgs field, as long as it is also the case that the energy content of that body also depends on how it interacts with the Higgs field (which it does).

A 1MeV photon and a 1MeV electron both have exactly the same inertia. So clearly the inertia of a particle does not depend on the Higgs mechanism. Again, this amounts to you conflating rest mass with inertial mass. The rest mass of a particle is not proportional to its inertia unless that particle is at rest.

I'm not conflating inertial mass with rest mass Stimpson. Do not accuse me of such. When mass is not qualified, physicists mean rest mass.

The fact remains that the standard model does not claim that the inertia of a particle ever depends on the Higgs mechanism. The rest mass does. And rest mass is not the same thing as inertia.

And like I said before, if you object to the term "mass" being used to refer to inertial mass, then you need to stop claiming that mass is a measure of energy content, because it quite demonstrably is not.

At best, you could say that the inertia of a particle at rest depends on the Higgs mechanism. But that doesn't contradict the fact that it depends on the energy of the particle, because of course the energy of a particle at rest depends on the Higgs mechanism.

Not according to Einstein it doesn't. And according to Higgs, the mass of a particle at rest depends on the Higgs mechanism.

Show me where Einstein ever said that the energy of a particle cannot depend on how strongly that particle interacts with various fields. He never said it, because he knew better.

The Higgs mechanism is said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter. The other 99% depends on the energy-content of a body.

No, all 100% of the mass of matter depends on the energy content of the various particles that make it up, including the part that results from the Higgs mechanism.

And by the way, all of that other 99% of the mass of matter comes from interaction with other fields. Mostly the gluon field (which is responsible for most of the mass of protons and neutrons). The only particle in the standard model that has intrinsic rest mass (meaning rest mass that is not the result of interaction with other fields) is the Higgs boson.

But since the Higgs mechanism does not claim that the total inertia of the electron positron pair won't be equal to the total inertia of the two photons, you are dead wrong in claiming that the Higgs mechanism somehow contradicts this.

I didn't claim it did. I said the Higgs mechanism isn't responsible for the rest mass of the electron.

You said that the Higgs mechanism contradicts E=mc^2. It doesn't. You were wrong.

As for your claim that the Higgs mechanism is not responsible for the rest mass of the electron, you haven't provided any support for that claim. All you have provided is the non-sequitur that since the rest mass of the electron is a measure of its energy content when it is at rest, that the Higgs mechanism cannot be responsible for the fact that it has a non-zero rest mass.

Einstein made it clear that the photon conveys inertia. So if pair production provides only enough energy to create an electron (and a positron) at rest momentarily before they annihilate, then that electron at rest got its inertia from the photon energy. Not from the Higgs mechanism. And becaused it's at rest, its inertial mass is its rest mass.

Yes, it got its inertia from the photon, and not from the Higgs mechanism. If you think that the standard model claims that the electron would get its inertia from the Higgs mechanism, then you have misunderstood the model.

All the Higgs mechanism does is cause 0.511MeV of the energy that the photon does give the electron to take the form of rest energy rather than kinetic energy. And likewise it thus causes 0.511MeV/c^2 of the inertial mass that the photon gives the electron to take the form of rest mass.

It would be like if I gave my Niece $100, and her mother made her put $80 in her savings acount and keep $20 as cash. I, not her mother, gave her the $100. The fact that her mother determined how much of that is in her savings account does not change that. The total money she has is still $100, just as the total energy (and thus the total inertia) of the electron and positron is the full energy/inertia "given" to them by the two photons. Her mother just determined how that money would be distributed between her savings and checking accounts, just as the Higgs mechanism determines how the energy/inertia will be distributed between rest-energy and kinetic-energy.

It's not the Higgs mechanism, it's h.

I have no idea what you mean by that.

Anyway, let's keep separate your theory about what determines the rest mass the electron separate from your claims about why the Higgs mechanism violated E=mc^2. What I am trying to refute here is your claim that the standard model somehow claims that the Higgs mechanism gives inertia to particles like electrons. That is not what the model actually claims.

You can argue that it is incorrect to say that her mother determined that she would have $100, and you would be absolutely correct. Likewise, you can claim that the Higgs mechanism is not what gives the electron-positron pair their inertia in pair production. And again you would be absolutely correct. What is incorrect is the assertion that anybody is actually claiming that the Higgs mechanism does give particles their inertia. It does not. The Higgs mechanism does not provide inertia to particles. It just influences the rest mass of certain particles.

And when a particle is at rest it has inertial mass which is the same as rest mass when its at rest. What do you think Einstein was on about with Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content? He referred to trsting the theory with radium salts. Do you seriously want people to think they were flying around at a significant fraction of c?

Did you even read what I just said? Because this response is completely irrelevant to it. What I am telling you is that the standard model does not claim that the Higgs mechanism provides inertia to particles.

Do you get that or not? Yes or no: Do you acknowledge that I have told you that the standard model does not claim that the Higgs mechanism provides inertia to particles?

If you disagree with me on this, then show me in the standard model where it says this.

Yeah yeah. You haven't forced me to acknowledge anything Stimpson. And it's me giving the actual science here. I'm the one quoting Einstein and referring to experiment and giving the carefully laid-out explanation. It's the other guys saying nay nay nay and you don't understand it when they even can't explain it themselves.

Yeah, you quote Einstein an awful lot. Too bad the quotes you provide don't actually support your claims. You are attacking a strawman version of the Higgs mechanism that is based on your complete ignorance about what the theory actually claims.

And at least two professional physicist here (possibly more) have been explaining it. But you don't listen. You seem to think that you understand this stuff better than people who have studied it extensively. You talk about "doing your own research" when your "research" appears to amount to reading things on the web, while those of us with PhDs in the field actually have done real scientific research, and have read about and studied the actual scientific research that the standard model is based on (as opposed to the non-technical stuff about it that you have read on the web).

Put bluntly, you are making a complete fool of yourself. Nobody here is impressed with your feigned expertise. Nobody reading this thread actually believes that you know what you are talking about. And nobody cares if you put them on ignore for being mean to you.

 

[Almo]

...waves are always associated with angular momentum.

Completely and utterly false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not what we observe. Cannot be substantiated by experiment.

You can't have a reasonable discussion about physics with someone who believes that waves are always associated with angular momentum. My evidence? This thread.

 

[Cuddles]

in a nutshell the Michelson-Morley experiment didn't find any evidence to support the existence of aether, and demonstrated that whichever direction you measured the speed of light, you always got the same answer....The Higgs mechanism totally disregards this, and proposes a Higgs substance instead. That's an aether, and it's totally at odds with SR. Sticking "relativistic" on the description just doesn't fix any of this.

Nope. The Higgs condensate is not an aether, at least not in the 19th century sense. It's Lorentz invariant (actually, it's more - it's Poincare invariant). It does not have a rest frame and it does not pick out a direction, so it's very much not like a normal medium. The speed of light is c in all directions in the presence of such a condensate, because it's Lorentz invariant.

In fact, this is beautiful demonstration of just how little Farsight understands. The Higgs field effectively is an aether just, as you say, not quite in the way the term was originally used. In fact, the path leading up to the work of Higgs and others was partly based on the early work of plasma physicist Anderson (check the references in the paper I linked earlier). Anderson wasn't actually particularly interested in that area of particle physics. What he was thinking about was how the universe might look to a hypothetical being that lived inside a plasma, and in particular what laws of physics such a being might deduce from observations.

Photons have zero rest mass, and as a consequence can have any energy. Massive particles cannot have any possible energy, since they have a minimum energy due to their mass. In a plasma, there is a phenomenon known as the plasma frequency. Above this frequency photons can penetrate the plasma, but below it they can't. This is how radio waves can bounce off the ionosphere, for example. That means the hypothetical being inside a plasma would observe photons to have a minimum energy, and would therefore deduce that they have mass. There is also another related phenomenon that light consists of transverse waves with no longitudinal component, while in a plasma they excite longitudinal oscillations called plasmons, and this also implies a massive particle.

So what Anderson had done was show that given a particular kind of background, a particle which would normally be expected to be massless could actually behave in every way as though they had mass. In a universe filled with a uniform plasma, photons would have mass due to their interaction with this all-pervading condensate. In effect, we're the being in Anderson's plasma. Without knowing about the Higgs field, we observe certain particles to have mass that we wouldn't expect. Interaction with the plasma/Higgs condensate simply explains why that happens.

Of course, the plasma in that case is non-relativistic and effectively matches early ideas of the aether - a plasma gives you a preferred frame of reference and we know there isn't one. As Farsight says, we've already disproved that this kind of aether exists. What Farsight completely misses is that we've only disproved this specific kind of aether. The Michelson-Morley experiment says absolutely nothing about a relativistic aether, and neither does Einstein, relativity, or anything else. Far from the Higgs mechanism ignoring this, the fundamental basis of the whole thing is the discovery of a way to generalise Anderson's work to what is essentially a relativistic aether. The entire reason this work was important is not because physicists are all idiots who just ignored Einstein's work, it's because they found a way to describe an aether that is entirely consistent with Einstein's work. It's generally not referred to as an aether because that term is associated with the long discredited non-relativistic aether. Farsight nicely demonstrates the sort of confusion that can cause in people who don't know anything about the field.

Now, the idea of some weird substance filling the whole universe might sound a bit crazy, but it's not actually a new or unusual idea at all. OK, the Higgs field is present everywhere in the universe. Well so is the gravitational field. So is the electromagnetic field. And we've long accepted that empty vacuum is actually filled with particles constantly popping in and out of existence. The behaviour of all particles is already governed by their interaction with these background fields of the universe. Adding in another one isn't really such a big step, especially if it explains a bunch of stuff that no-one's managed to explain in any other way.

 

[Tubbythin]

In fact, this is beautiful demonstration of just how little Farsight understands. The Higgs field effectively is an aether just, as you say, not quite in the way the term was originally used. In fact, the path leading up to the work of Higgs and others was partly based on the early work of plasma physicist Anderson (check the references in the paper I linked earlier). Anderson wasn't actually particularly interested in that area of particle physics. What he was thinking about was how the universe might look to a hypothetical being that lived inside a plasma, and in particular what laws of physics such a being might deduce from observations.

Photons have zero rest mass, and as a consequence can have any energy. Massive particles cannot have any possible energy, since they have a minimum energy due to their mass. In a plasma, there is a phenomenon known as the plasma frequency. Above this frequency photons can penetrate the plasma, but below it they can't. This is how radio waves can bounce off the ionosphere, for example. That means the hypothetical being inside a plasma would observe photons to have a minimum energy, and would therefore deduce that they have mass. There is also another related phenomenon that light consists of transverse waves with no longitudinal component, while in a plasma they excite longitudinal oscillations called plasmons, and this also implies a massive particle.

So what Anderson had done was show that given a particular kind of background, a particle which would normally be expected to be massless could actually behave in every way as though they had mass. In a universe filled with a uniform plasma, photons would have mass due to their interaction with this all-pervading condensate. In effect, we're the being in Anderson's plasma. Without knowing about the Higgs field, we observe certain particles to have mass that we wouldn't expect. Interaction with the plasma/Higgs condensate simply explains why that happens.

Genuinely fascinating. Top post Cuddles.

 

[Farsight]

(1) Making an electron (or pair producing an electron-positron pair) costs more energy in the presence of a Higgs condensate than without one (all else being equal), because of the interaction of the Higgs condensate with the electron field.

A bald unsupported assertion.

(2) Therefore, the energy content of an electron that was produced in the presence of a Higgs condensate is higher than one that was produced with zero Higgs condensate (all else being equal).

As above.

((3) Therefore, since m=E/c², the mass of an electron that was produced in the presence of a Higgs condensate is higher than one that was produced with zero Higgs condensate.

Huh? According to the Higgs mechanism, with no Higgs condensate the electron has no mass, contradicting what Einstein said: The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. You're left with an electron that not only has no mass, but has no energy either.

Which of those steps violates E=mc², Farsight?

The third one, because E=mc² means m=E/c², so if m=0 then E=0 too. Next!

 

[Tubbythin]

Huh? According to the Higgs mechanism, with no Higgs condensate the electron has no mass, contradicting what Einstein said: The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. You're left with an electron that not only has no mass, but has no energy either.

No, you're left with an electron that has no rest mass. It's total energy would be determined by the same equation that determines that of a photon: E=pc.

 

[Farsight]

Here we have someone who admits he is not a physicist and routinely demonstrates he is quite limited in his mathematics skills. This same person demands professionals and others accept that he has discovered that all mainstream physicists throughout the world are grossly wrong in how physics is done and interpreted. He takes the very bizarre position that only he has interpreted a milestone 1905 paper correctly and all subsequent developments in the intervening 107 years are mostly wrong. All this from someone who is not a physicist. Wow! Just plain -- WOW!

Oh, just listen to those ad-hominems. Am I still talking to you? I can't recall, but I'll do you the honour anyway. The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content doesn't take any interpreting. So how can you justify dismissing it? When you can't explain the Higgs mechanism at all? Your counter-argument is merely the evidence doesn't count, Einstein doesn't count, you must be wrong because we can't be wrong. Well I got news for you. You can. Next.

 

[Farsight]

So do Chalmers and Giudice have an alternative explanation for the observed interactions at 125 GeV/c?

I don't know. As far as I know Chalmers is a science writer, reporting what physicists say instead of putting forward his own views. Giudice is a CERN physicist who was rather skeptical about the Higgs mechanism in A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC. There's a search-inside feature on Amazon, search on "higgs sector" and read pages 173 and 175. He says things like "frightfully ad-hoc", "toilet of the Standard model" and "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." You get a very different impression to the one you get from the CERN press releases.

 

[Cuddles]

According to the Higgs mechanism, with no Higgs condensate the electron has no mass

Actually, this is a part that you have completely wrong but that I think Sol has wrong as well. The Higgs mechanism addresses gauge bosons in a gauge theory. In the particular context of the Standard Model, the Higgs mechanism gives an electroweak theory with massive W and Z bosons and a massless photon, where previous attempts could only predict they were all massless. It actually says nothing at all about the mass of the electron, which was already adequately explained by QED around the 1940s.

 

[Farsight]

The Higgs boson has been researched extensively for decades. If that statement was true then how come any research was done on the Higgs boson when it was so obvious that it could not exist?

Don't ask me, RC. But see Woit's blog where he talks about SUSY as an unstoppable juggernaut, and is skeptical of the way John Ellis always finds a way to say that a nil result supports it. Maybe the Higgs boson is something like that.

My guess: the "gathers mass from everything it touches" is wrong.

Maybe. I've not been saying that, and was surprised to see it in New Scientist. That's black-hole-swallows the-Earth-stuff, which I've never advocated.

AFAIK the Higgs boson gets its mass from the Higgs field just like the other particles. For example:
We (Apparently) Found the Higgs Boson. Now, Where the Heck Did It Come From?

I had a look. Here's a fair-use excerpt:

"But how did the electrons and quarks that make up all the matter in the universe (for technical reasons, perhaps except for neutrinos) get their mass? That we still don’t know. But once we understand how the Ws and the Z gain their mass from their interaction with the Higgs field, we assume that we also know how mass in general is created: through the same “Higgs mechanism”, and that this primeval cosmic event shortly after the Big Bang has thus created the mass of the universe: electrons, quarks, stars, galaxies, planets, trees, animals, and us."

Note that he's saying we don't know how the electron gets its mass, and that it's only an assumption that the Higgs mechanism is responsible. Also note that "how mass in general is created" is a falsehood, because the Higgs mechanism is only responsible for the 1% of the mass of matter. Here's another excerpt:

"So how did the Higgs itself get its mass?—we now know from the discovery just announced at CERN that the Higgs has a mass of about 125 GeV (about 1 1/2 times the mass of the Ws and the Z). The answer may surprise you: The Higgs gives itself mass!"

That's a junk-science pop-science circular non-answer. The mass comes from the kinetic energy given to the LHC protons, by virtue of E=mc². But if you insist that it's a self-interaction whereby an excitation of the Higgs field can interact with the Higgs field, then a photon can surely interact with a photon as per photon-photon pair production. The alternative is to believe that pair production occurs because pair production occurs, which is another circular non-answer. As a poster on a skeptics forum, you shouldn't be accepting stuff like that.

 

[ben m]

Actually, this is a part that you have completely wrong but that I think Sol has wrong as well. The Higgs mechanism addresses gauge bosons in a gauge theory. In the particular context of the Standard Model, the Higgs mechanism gives an electroweak theory with massive W and Z bosons and a massless photon, where previous attempts could only predict they were all massless. It actually says nothing at all about the mass of the electron, which was already adequately explained by QED around the 1940s.

(Not a theorist, so a bit out of my depth, but

My understanding is that there *is* a gauge-invariance problem with any (non-Higgs-based) fermion masses in the Standard Model. My understanding is, further, that since you really need to posit a Higgs field to explain the gauge boson masses, you might as well (but aren't strictly forced to) reuse it to give you nice gauge-invariant fermion masses, too. If there's a necessary connection between these two, no one has ever explained it to me.

However: now that the LHC has actually seen the Higgs, and in particular since it's seen *both* a fermion-coupling decay (top loops leading to higgs gamma gamma) and a gauge-boson-coupling decay (H->ZZ and H->WW) of what appears to be the same 125 GeV particle ... well, that basically confirms the simple picture above. Seeing Higgs tau tau would nail it down. Building a 250GeV linear collider and measuring the Higgs resonance width would *really* nail it down, eh? Let's do that.

 

[Farsight]

You certainly wasted your time there with that wall of irrelevant stuff!

You never addressed the question: Farsight: Is the Higgs mechanism a relativistic quantum field theory?
i.e. is it is based on special relativity and is thus consistent with E=mc^2.
First pointed out 1 November 2012

Yes, I addressed it. I answered it, and you totally dismissed my answer. But you were part right. I certainly wasted my time there. Here's my answer in case you feel like discussing it in good faith: post #527. Until you do, please don't try to claim that I haven't answered your question.

How about just showing that the Higgs mechanism is not Lorentz invariant?

There's no point. If it wasn't, it would be obviously at odds with SR even to you. Besides, Lorentz invariance isn't the issue, the issue is that E=mc² means what it says on the can. If you've got energy in the guise of a body, it has mass because m=E/c² and not for some other reason that is only assumed.