and according to that article Feynman was open to larger than one probabilities

Or an axiom of the no-lose theorem is wrong. Which may count as more exciting, of course.

“The experiments will have the final say, as they tend to do. ”

Exactly.

Nice article! I have two questions.
1. Can Higgs really serve as inflation field??
2. At finite temperature will the behavior of Higgs change??

Thanks.

http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.WhoseMass.pdf

Speak for yourself, paleface! Maybe most people don’t need no “stinking Higgs”, but there are some nice people constituting the particle physics priesthood who really need it. They are the closest the media establishment can come to ordaining science in place of religion to “explain” (haha!) the universe. The masters of the world will look pretty stupid (or even more stupid) if all the Nova programs, Time magazine covers and all imitations are discovered to be erroneous, while the illiterate telepreachers blame gay atheistic eggheads for tinkering with God’s handiwork.

LMMI– No question that the Higgs introduces other problems, especially with fine-tuning. Supersymmetry and other approaches aim to solve those problems. But the breakdown of unitarity isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a serious flaw that simply has to be addressed somehow. It might be the Higgs, or something else.

Note that this is only “tree-level” unitarity, meaning that if you only look at the lowest order diagrams (the trees) that unitarity is not preserved. The loophole is that higher order diagrams may restore unitarity. As the energies get higher, this requires higher order diagrams to become more important than low order diagrams, a sign that your perturbation theory is not worth much anymore in the fields you have chosen to expand it. The same thing happens at really low energies with QCD: it becomes perturbatively non-unitary and the best perturbative description we have is in terms of hadrons.

You can still argue that quarks are gluons are not irrelevant at low-energies. Lattice QCD does provide a way of doing some calculations in the non-perturbative regime. As far as I am aware, this is still a viable “out” from the Higgs theorem. We may not see anything “new”, but interesting strong dynamics.

By “new” I am referring to new fundamental fields. In much the same way that we don’t consider the proton to be a “new field” at low energies, but a bound state of some messy QCD stuff. In terms of doing computations at these energies, it is certainly convenient to treat the proton as a new field and thus restore perturbative unitarity.

I try my best to understand the pros and cons of the above, but tend to get stuck on the basics (I’m not sure I understand the strict meaning of “quartic coupling” sufficiently, nor why the nature of these couplings naturally seems to make the Higgs mass blow up unless exquisite radiative corrections or other mechanisms fix the problem).

If it’s not an imposition on the author or his readership, any help?

http://lhc.fuw.edu.pl/kalinWW.pdf

From there it’s just a matter of calculation…

It was his assumption that the earth did not convect that was his main mistake (convection drastically elevates the effective thermal conductivity). John Perry pointed this out in the 1890′s in a number of nature papers, but ignored for 60 years until evidence of mantle convection became indisputable.
See:
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/17/1/pdf/i1052-5173-17-1-4.pdf
for a modern review,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_(engineer)
for background on Perry,
or
Nature 51, 341-342 (7 February 1895)
and
Nature 51, 582-585 (18 April 1895)
For the original articles

Modern estimates put radioactive decay at about 20-40% of the current oceanic crustal heat flow, with the rest being primordial heat.