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