And Bee if Lubos sees that cartoon, you know he’s gonna say “see I told you women’s brains were definitely different”
**

http://www.reuniting.info/images/mirror.jpg

Another problem might be is that you are asking us. You are considered weird enough by the public for being scientists. Amateurs like myself and others here are considered even weirder because we aren’t getting paid.

FWIW, I did like the explanation of the text that accompanied the several pics of a room of physicists for the Higgs field. The pic by itself wasn’t much.

The one chart should have showed the W and Z bosons being influenced by the Higgs while the photons and gluons plowed right through unimpeded.

Even with all that it is best to remember that only about 7% of any audience really does catch on to what any speaker or periodical states, even if they are interested.

Meet “Higgins” like Alice, has a namesake?

And of course, in line with the hat?

You can have the image of the “stringscape” morph into the picture of the hills and valleys?

Dawn Levy:

But it’s been a major sea change in the attitudes of theoretical physicists. Â… It means we have a mathematical framework to think about it. We have a basic set of precise concepts to think about it, and it means that in time we will know the truth.”

To produce an accurate graphic you need to translate the force strengths as a function of collision energy into force strengths as a function of distance from the particle core.

I think this is crucial to visually appreciate what is going on with the mass-generating Higgs field and also what the polarization of the virtual charges in the vacuum physically looks like (how far it extends for each species of virtual particle, etc) around a real (long-lived) particle. The usual talk of force strengths as a function of collision energy is misleading because it is not clearly explained to people that this means forces becomes stronger at closer range.

Ie, the electromagnetic force does not obey Coulomb’s law: at very close-in distances it rises faster than the inverse-square of distance because apparent charge rises. At 92 GeV electric charge is 7% stronger as measured in lepton scattering experiments.

Clearly the charge polarization is strongly linked to the Higgs mechanism because BOTH the electric charge and the particle mass are renormalized quantities: the bare charge and mass are larger than the observed values at a long distance. Because Yang-Mills exchange theories are behind the standard model which is well verified empirically, you therefore get a picture whereby exchange radiation is being shielded by the vacuum to create the charge variation. There is no reason why the exchange radiation energy should not be conserved like other forms of energy, so the absorption of this energy in the shielding region of vacuum charge polarization is used somehow. In that region you get short range nuclear forces, including massive weak gauge bosons, so it is perfectly feasible that the attenuation of the core electric charge gauge bosons near a particle creates strong forces. This allows numerical predictions, because you can calculate precisely how much electrmagnetic field energy is being lost due to shielding, and this will be how much nuclear force energy will be increased. Data are already available on this, allowing checks to be made.

At low energies, the experimentally determined strong nuclear force strength is alpha = 1 (which is about 137 times the Coulomb law), but it falls to alpha = 0.35 at a collision energy of 2 GeV, 0.2 at 7 GeV, and 0.1 at 200 GeV or so. The electric force strength increases from alpha = 1/137 at low energies to 1/128 at 92 GeV. So as one force falls, another rises, suggesting that the energy carried by all gauge bosons is conserved at any given distance from a particle (or collision energy, since higher energies imply closer distances).

A switch in general thinking towards graphical illustrations of polarization and force effects as a function of distance would help to make the dynamics clearer for the mass causing Higgs mechanism. Clearly there is a close association between the massive W and Z gauge bosons and the mass carrying “Higgs” boson. Just as old CGS units created problems for physicists in some areas, so the convention of thinking of forces as a function of energy rather than distance makes it needlessly abstract. A pictorial way of thinking may help progress, but will require much work because it is hard to work out the exact distance of close approach in high energy collisions because of the complexity of inelastic scatter reactions.

Carl

As a more general point, I think the physics community would do much better in trying to explain something simple in enough detail so that a reasonably intelligent person could understand it (like very basic aspects of rotation symmetry), and then say, well, we have generalizations of these ideas that are too hard for you to understand right now (that’s why it takes YEARS of study to become a physicist!), but here’s a very rough and incomplete outline.

My problem with these graphics and the text is that they try to convey quite abstract concepts in a very small amount of space & time, and it’s just not possible.

But then, perhaps the opinions of someone who can’t spell “do” should not be taken too seriously …

For SUSY, I like the mirror the best — the top left one is also on the right track, but the lines connecting the particles are a no-no. (It’s important to convey that each type of particle has a superpartner, not each actual particle!) I like the idea of a mirror world where things are similar but different. How about combining the mirror idea with the dancers? An image of some men and women representing particles — boys can be bosons, females can be fermions — but each wearing distinct outfits. (There would be an electron uniform, a photon uniform, etc.) Then a mirror that shows a set of people wearing the same kinds of uniforms, but all the women have turned into men and vice-versa. You could do two of them: one for unbroken SUSY where the sizes and shapes were basically the same, and one for broken SUSY where the mirror people were bloated and huge.

The Higgs person could be holding on to a tree branch or some other anchor (symbolizing its nonzero vev) while the fermion and weak gauge boson people could be tied to the Higgs and each other, anchored by the Higgs (the ties symbolizing the interactions, and the anchoring symbolizing mass).

Also this one is quite nice too? It was used here so I think “the point” is clear?

The two clocks depicted in the official logo for the CPT ’04 meeting are related by the parity transformation (P). The inversion of black and white represents charge conservation (C), while time reversal (T) is represented by the movement of the hands of the clock in opposite directions.

You can easily show a latice representing a quantum field. You just show a lattice where springs connect neighrest neigbors. You can let the who le thing oscillate.

You can show an excited state propagating throught the lattice which represents a moving particle.

You can show interacting quantum fields by showing a lattice consisting of two sublattices.

You can try to depict the Higgs effect by showing a lattice with two sublatices where one of the sublatices only couples to the other sublattice.

It’s not clear to me that most folks have a good grasp of what a “symmetry” actually is. What you do think?

I would talk (and draw) about symmetry breaking, which is much easier to illustrate and a much more fundamental notion. I would then ask the reader/viewer to take it on faith that massless particles can have more symmetry than massive ones, and that’s why breaking symmetry can give particles mass.

One thing I don’t like about this picture is the fallen columns picking out a physical direction. It seems as if the runners should be able to go full speed in the direction that the columns fell, but is slowed in the perpendicular direction. A solution is to have the fallen columns thick enough to cover the ground, so the runner can’t go full speed in any direction.

I originally though of trees rather than column, but it seemed that a drawing with trees would get too complicated. Another possibility is people standing at a party and then falling over to break the symmetry.

Gavin