My issue with the term, beyond the religious overtones, is that it somehow gives the impression that the Higgs particle is in privileged position in the standard model, the origin of mass etc. etc., whereas the truth is that the VEV of the Higgs field does all those miracles. Those are simply two different (albeit related) objects with similar names.

And as we also know, even the only-very-slightly-more-responsible statement that the “Higgs explains particle mass” is also utterly misleading. 1) The Higgs does not explain the values of rest masses of individual fundamental particles. 2) The Higgs also does not explain the old problem of why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass. The Higgs just couples proportionally to mass and is needed to make the standard model make any sense at all (and not give infinite predictions just above the TeV scale).

Maybe (just maybe…) the real Higgs might turn out to help us answer those two questions. But the predicted standard model one, as we know, does not.

George,
The Higgs mechanism does generate field-theoretic masses for the elementary particles. The actual values depend on the Yukawa couplings, and these are free parameters in the Standard Model. Thus, the Standard Model offers no explanation of the mass hierarchies and mixings between the different generations. However, the Yukawa couplings can be explained naturally within string theory.

Oh, so this particle is not what we are supposed to be worshiping? That New York Times always gets me.

I don’t see it as higher order effect, but it is a matter of taste. The point is that explaining the masses of elementary particles in terms of properties of the medium the propagate in, meaning in this case the Higgs VEV, is much less mysterious than relating them to some godly particle. It is intuitive and almost precisely correct to imagine the particles becoming massive because it is “more difficult” to move in the medium for which the Higgs field has acquired a VEV.

(more generally, the elementary objects in our description of almost everything are quantum fields, not particles. Many times they don’t even have “associated particles”, would be nice if this was better appreciated, but that’s a different story…)

I agree w/Sean re: Lederman’s shameless hype to sell his (I think) rather lowbrow rundown of particle physix and Higgsy…Or George Smoot’s post-COBE press conf., gushing, “Its like seeing god…”.
Arthur C. Clarke(Isacc Asimov?) once quipped that any sufficiently advanced technology or species would appear `god-like’ to lower denizens of the galactic populace.
If Holger Nielsen’s recent speculation that advanced effects from the future might manipulate discoveries at the LHC, then perhaps `WE’ in the future are playing god, with ourselves in the present, not unlike the `gods’ of Olympus, merrily throwing hints of Higgsy, sparticles,and black holes our way to confuse us, all to their perverse delight.
Only a god could ignore causality in the interest of illusion and games….

“Materialist” is a term coined by supernaturalists. IIRC.. I’m sure your googlefu is as good as my own.

There’s native framing to science. An example I’ve seen is “atheistic science”.

Translate particle for field as and when required.

Just as C.E. will slowly replace A.D., the scientists should first recoin a secular punch word until the rest of the world eventually catches on and drop g.p. as passe. Something as pithy as ‘black hole’.

Besides what happens if LHC detects more exotic and heavier particles? If the god particle turns out to be not the ultimate IT, those lay people who bought the coinage for wrong reasons may turn against science irreparably.

Sooner the better to reinvent a word, preferably before Higgs is found, if it ever will be found, and all the epoch making news can refer to the new name without a single mention of g.p. Hopefully that should rectify a misnomer. Good luck, scientists!

Einstein is also quoted as saying. “religion without science is dead, science without religion is blind.”
While I’m under no illusion that Einstein was a “Christian” any more than Benjamin Franklin, there was no doubt that he (and Franklin) believed there was a supernatural,divine, intelligent being who created the universe “ex nihlo” from nothing. His belief in this “mystical/mythical” (today’s “scientific” viewpoint) did not impede his contributions to science any more than it did Issac newton, or Kepler who also openly enbraced a Creator-God.

> I propose that we start referring to supersymmetry as the God symmetry.
Why? Because it does not exist ?

Oops, yes, I meant to say elementary particle.

Sean, although the vast bulk of hadron mass is binding energy, isn’t it also the case that if quarks had zero mass, protons would outweigh neutrons and we wouldn’t be here to discuss all this?

Why does attention typically focus on the question of fermion mass to the neglect of EW symmetry-breaking? Can I, in my journalistic capacity, describe the Higgs in terms of making photons and E&M what they are, flavor physics, etc.?

George

I like babel particle a lot.

George, yes, lots of things would certainly be different if quarks were massless. But it nucleons would still have roughly 1GeV of mass.

And every particle physicist in the world would put you on a pedestal if you chose to explain the Higgs (particle/field/mechanism) in terms of symmetry-breaking rather than mass-giving. The former is the real point, the latter is a spinoff that gets attention because it’s a bit easier to immediately grasp. It’s just hard to explain the symmetry-breaking business to your friend on the elevator. Especially when you’re breaking SU(2)xU(1) down to U(1), and people might be puzzled by what that means. (You would like to say “before EW symmetry breaking, W’s and Z’s were just like photons,” which is kind of true, but not exactly, because of the abelian vs. non-abelian thing.)

Perhaps, if Leon Lederman had invented that term a few years earlier, Congress would not have killed the SSC?

I much prefer the Oh my God particle.

Moshe, Sean: can you put some flesh on the bones of the phase-transition description? That is, without one utterance of the term “gauge symmetry”, can you explain what exactly the phases in question are and why the transition cleaves the EW interaction?
George

So, I for one would be grateful for an intuitive explanation of the Higgs mechanism.

Imagine how those of us who are trying to follow progress in this area from a lay perspective feel! I greatly appreciate all the effort put into making these difficult but important concepts more accessible.

It’s very interesting to me that Moshe brings up the gauge symmetry (or non-symmetry) in this regard, as that has always been another plainly critical area in which I have had difficulty formulating an intuitive understanding. Indeed, it often seems to form the limit at which my understanding of a given subject fails, or becomes entirely metaphorical.

I for one applaud the dogged “pedantry.”

FWIW, this sort of issue is why I no longer rely on science journalists at all. No offense to George and the others who are working hard to get it right, but one information-lossy translation (from rigorous mathematical science to a non-expert-comprehensible english formulation) is bad enough. For that translation then to be re-filtered through a third party is simply too much. Thus the value I place on forums such as this one.

It’s like running MP3 compression on a CD audio file – which is bad enough, it amazes me that people claim they can’t hear the difference – and then re-encoding the resulting MP3 file using another lossy codec. The end result is full of noise artifacts and lacks articulation in the details across the spectrum, especially at the limits. In many cases important aspects of the original idea (or song ;o) are completely lost.

I thought that the Egyptians worshipped the Delta, Lemurians worsipped the Mu, sleepwalkers worshipped the Z, Hugh Hefner worshipped the Top, Simple Simon worshipped the Pi, Gell-Mann and Joyce worshippede the Quark, magicians worshipped the Charm, catfish worshipped the Bottom, H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort worshipped the Strange, Republicans worshipped the W, and Yiddish speakers worshipped the Nu.

As for the “God Particle” business, I propose a new name :

The Uber-Particle.

Take that LL!

I think that the point Moshe is raising is important, though I can’t help him find an intuitive explanation. His point that gauge “symmetry” isn’t a symmetry in any meaningful sense is the real blockbuster, because we have famous physicists going around saying things like “symmetry is all” blah blah blah. Long ago I attended a class on the differential geometry of gauge theory, and by the end it dawned on me that differential geometers don’t really care about gauge transformations, and the idea that connections exist “because” you “need to make gauge invariance local” just makes them giggle.

Meanwhile, Sean said “in my personal hierarchy”….wasn’t he afraid that physicists would be confused by such religious language? By the way, are physicists confused by religious locutions like, “Holy shit!!” ?

Yeah, there is that, nicely summarized by Weinberg’s “Superconductivity For Particular Theorists”(Prog.Theor.Phys.Suppl.86:43,1986). This only pushes the issue one step back…

(Also, probably should be obvious but I should say this issue definitely is nitpicking. I just wish I had better analogy to use, so I am asking…)

Greg, there are lots of equivalence-principle experiments that try to measure the different accelerations of objects made from different materials, and the people who do such experiments and make predictions for them definitely know that the baryon mass comes mostly from QCD, and are on the lookout for any deviations from the standard wisdom.

The current best in science is clearly an House of Word Definiton Mirrors that can only be notated in meaningful way by compex problematic math —which math has completed obscured local event detailed mechanics. A comletrion of Einstein’s deterministic universe is avaiable at my website for those who would like to quit playing with words and actually mind’s eye see ir all in infinite mechanical detail. The Universal Harmony (UH)=designer God real time self assembles and unasembles visible matter (VM)— as that VM is interactively immersed by ideal fluid dark matter that fills all space-time in a “no-force-at-a-distance-way” for an infinite, stable and closed, non-problematic universe. A gross simplification of Einstein’s field Equation does the trick G = R/3(v-squared) see details at website. That UH- Designer God allows organic matter to space-time build conizance that allows itself free will — and therefore problematic, trial & error existence.

Moshe,

Can’t we take the asymptotic value of the Higgs doublet to be the order parameter? This is invariant under local gauge transformations, but I get confused about whether I should call this a “physical” quantity or not.

“We do ourselves a great disservice by labeling the mysterious order of quarks and quasars with the name of a storm-bringer once worshiped on a patch of land beside the Mediterranean Sea.”

Actually, the Mediterranean storm-bringer’s current followers are presumptuous to claim exclusive rights to the use of “god.” This is no more Yahweh’s name than it is Isis’ or Odin’s name.

I’d think that calling it the “god particle” is irksome to fundies – though that’s not a good enough reason to keep doing it.

Ellipsis, thanks for the tips! I’ve had no luck yet, but I’ll keep looking.

FWIW, a naive back-of-the-envelope calculation (in which I trust Wikipedia that the force between gluons is of the order of 100 N, and I treat the mass and radius of the proton as being the relevant parameters for determining density and tension) implies that, in geometric units, the tension-to-density ratio is about 6 parts in 10^4. But I don’t know how that would vary with direction in a proton’s ground state, or how close it is to what a genuine QCD calculation would yield.

Greg — if a decent calculation (even a classical mechanics one) indicates that it might be an observable effect at an experiment similar to ATRAP or ATHENA, wait a few days to think (and make sure you haven’t made a mistake), and then send an e-mail to Gerry Gabrielse or one of his colleagues. They’ll probably correct you, but that’s OK.

Greg, the effect you are looking for simply doesn’t exists in a theory consistent with Special Relativity. Applying the same force in different directions for the same time will accelerate an anisotropic body to the same speeds in the respective directions, provided you start with the object at rest.

The crucial thing here is that the momentum of the body is zero when you start to accelerate it…

Cecil,
In answer to your other question–the Higgs does have a mass, and it arises from a non-linear self-interaction

Ellipsis:
I read the article(s). My questions apparently can be answered in the affirmative. However, I have a more general question concerning scalar fields that are suppose to permeate all of space. During inflation when space is expanding at several times the speed of light, the accepted wisdom is that the scalar field(s) will expand allong with space and maintain the same energy density, save quantum variations. Did the Higgs field exist during inflation? If not when did it come into existance? What caused it? Is the idea of a scalar field that permeates all of space and can travel faster than the speed of light bother anyone? If not why not? I know: no information is conveyed. That seems like a copout. Where are the dynamical equations that describe this field during inflation? Not space but this field.

Thanks to everyone who wants to chime in and set me on the correct path of understanding this issue, which has troubled me every since inflation was predicted.

Count Iblis, I’m about 80% sure I’m right, but I’m self-educated in this subject and if you can come up with a reference to a published result in relativistic continuum mechanics that contradicts my claim I’ll be very interested to read it.

As I understand it, the nice simple formula they teach in elementary SR relating four-force, rest mass and four-acceleration, F=ma, is only strictly true for point particles (though in most situations it should be a very good approximation). A continuum object needs to be analysed with a stress-energy tensor, and if that tensor is anisotropic, the force needed to achieve acceleration of the body in different directions will be anisotropic too. (You emphasise the notion of “starting with the object at rest”, but that’s implicit in the whole idea of proper acceleration anyway: you measure proper acceleration in a frame co-moving with the body’s centre-of-mass.)

To take one simple example, suppose you have an elastic string being trailed by a uniformly accelerating body. I’ve analysed this scenario for a simple linear model of elasticity on this page. It’s not hard to show that conservation of energy-momentum, i.e. setting the divergence of the stress-energy tensor of the material to zero, yields the equation:

(1/s) [rho(s)+p(s)] + p’(s) = 0

where s is a spatial coordinate measured orthogonal to the world lines of the Rindler frame for the accelerating body, rho(s) is the proper density of mass-energy in the material (including elastic potential energy), and p(s) is the pressure (which will be negative, as the string will be under tension).

Now -p’(s) gives the net force on an infinitesimal element of the string, and (1/s) gives the acceleration of the hyperbolic world lines in a Rindler frame. So this equation resembles “F=ma”, but instead of rho(s) alone — the proper mass-energy of our element of string — we have rho(s)+p(s). This is due to the fact that the pressure/tension in an accelerating body is changing direction in space-time, and contributing to the momentum density.

However, if we calculate the force/acceleration relationship for an acceleration in a direction in which there is no tension, we will get a different effective inertial mass: just rho(s). So there is an anisotropic response to applied force.

Another example is the case of a rotating ring of elastic material. The total mass-energy of the ring in the centre-of-mass frame will be modified by kinetic and elastic potential energy, and if you compute the force needed to accelerate the ring with a given proper acceleration, a, in a direction orthogonal to the plane of the ring, it will simply be proportional to that total mass-energy. But if you accelerate the ring in the plane of rotation, the constant of proportionality, the effective inertial mass, will be different.

Another way to look at all this is to think about boosts. When you have a point particle, it simply possesses an energy-momentum vector, P, and its total energy as measured by an observer with 4-velocity u is just E=P.u. If you start with a particle at rest, E will initially equal m=|P|, and if you apply a boost to P then E will transform in a very simple way, which will be independent of the direction of the boost.

But when you have a composite system, E is found by integrating T^{00}, the time-time component of the system’s stress-energy tensor T. You can also integrate all four time components, T^{0a}, to get a total energy-momentum vector P. But even if you start with the centre-of-mass of the system at rest (i.e. the total momentum of the body in the observer’s reference frame is zero), if you apply a boost to T, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the change in E will be independent of the direction of the boost.

Hi Greg,

It should be the case that the anisotropic effects are described by the angular momentum. So, mass and angular momentum are the two relevant parameters that you can extract from the energy-momebtum tensor.

It may be more convenient to look at collisions instead of a steady force. It should be the case that you have conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Any anistropic effects should be a consequence of this…

Iblis: That reminds me, to ask about to what extent the energy of rotation contributes to what we’d otherwise expect (if possible/available) for the masses of various fundamental particles. It is interesting because without a specific classical type mass distribution, we can’t say that the increase is to gamma times the rest value etc. And yet, note that there’s a magnetic field for the electron, which means charge distribution has at least an equivalent “radius” and “velocity.” I wonder if that can be compared, what we get when we pretend the electron is spinning as a shell of classical radius, etc, for any of that. I suppose it could mean something, but I hear little about it.

Greg: I had an article in Physics Essays years ago about the problem of accelerating a mass at the end of a long string. The wild west of extended body dynamics in relativity is one of my favorite avocations, and surprisingly it has been argued and disagreed about for years in journals. Ken Nordtvedt wrote about the equivalent gravitational situation earlier, in AJP. His effect, that a mass suspending pulls less on the holding end than the mg measured locally at the mass, didn’t get the attention it deserved (for example, it never AFAIK appeared in writings as a cute implication of GR, like “You could hold up an elephant in earth-style gravity if you had a long enough cord.”) Maybe one reason is, the increasing magnitude of the hyperbolic gravity field just cancels that “red shift” of weight, so you hold things anyway with the mg using g where your hand is! This confuses the issue and got critic Ø Grøn of Norway all worked up, and in error in my view. That guy sure was a booger for me too later, as referee of my own paper.

In any case, I’m sure you appreciate that stressed bodies in motion have a correction to the usual expressions for mass and momentum. (One illustration: if co-moving observes apply forces simultaneously to a rod seen by us in motion, the rod just sits there for them and no velocity increase for us. However, we see the rear force applied earlier. That puts “extra momentum” (f delta t) and energy (f dot v delta t) into the rod. The lateral shear version really explains the infamous “right-angle lever paradox.” When you apply those corrections to moving bodies, everything is supposed to work out (and per fundamental theorems), but it does make a mess when the stuff is accelerating. I finally got things to work out OK after the paper, where I couldn’t solve it at the time.

Count Iblis, Neil B., thanks for your comments.

Count Iblis, I agree that if you do an experiment in which the incoming state for our system S is completely isolated from the environment, and the outgoing state for S is just a boosted copy of the ingoing state, then an identical force applied to S for an identical time will lead to an identical change in velocity, in whatever direction the force is applied. That follows from conservation of energy-momentum.

Nevertheless, I believe it’s still possible to have anisotropic effects taking place during the interaction. If you imagine, say, a small square of elastic material subject to forces of 100 N and 101 N across the x-direction, and 200 N and 201 N across the y-direction, it will be subject to a net force of 1 N in both directions, but the different average tensions will give rise to small differences in its accelerations in the two directions. Given some complex anisotropic system, all that the conservation laws guarantee is an identical net effect over the course of the whole interaction, not a constant, direction-independent ratio between force and acceleration, holding moment by moment.

That said, everything I’ve read about protons since first raising this question makes it seem unlikely that anyone will be measuring such an effect for a proton any time this century.

One talks about “Professor Einstein crossing the room” and I do not find it to farfetched to see this as a “intuitive principle” inherent in the term phase transition looking at our early universe.

G -> H -> … -> SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) -> SU(3) x U(1).

Neither would I be to upset that what was illucive in terms of energy particle discriptions in Agasa was the continued struggle to describe what mathematics was approaching in terms of these new higher energy particles.

This was the original, and applying to what remains illucive until actual experimentation is just something we do in descrbing the mystery. We understand the nature of the scientists work here.

Some may have other agendas?