The Higgs Boson - A one page explanation | Hacker News Reader

The Higgs Boson - A one page explanation

hep.physics.utoronto.ca

97 pointsbrfox20 comments

What these explanations lack, and is so hard for the educated layman to understand, I think, is why this is so important to physicists. If you were a "layman" reading Maxwell's work (or rather Oliver Heaviside's, who put it in the much simpler form we know), you question would be similar: "I understand about photons and the electromagnetic force and the coolness of predicting the speed of light using theoretical mean. But what is it useful for?" Mathematicians face the same difficulty in explaining Riemann's hypothesis or the Poincare conjecture to people.

Someone needs to explain the following clearly:

* What if the Higgs boson doesn't exist? does this mean Gigg' theory is incorrect?

* What is Higgs' theory is totally incorrect?

* What if the boson has mass 10M (or 10000M) rather than M, how would the world (universe) be different?

* If the boson is found, are we "done", i.e. can we proceed with a coming up with a GUT?

The layman's understanding of the matter may be asymptotically limited: http://www.isgtw.org/images/2010/Chast_2010_04_26.jpg

I think I remember my father telling me about a cat who wandered into a particle collider as it was being built. It died inside, and nobody realized it until they tried to pump it down to a vacuum - and kept failing, because the dead animal kept outgassing.

I can't find any corroborating evidence after a 5 minute google search, so it might be an urban legend - but regardless, the answer to the next-to-last question is pretty well known.

The story of a Russian physicist sticking his head in an accelerator is told here: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3468/what-would-h.... Half of his face was badly burnt but he survived and even completed his PhD!

They are not trying to explain scientific thought. they are trying to explain the theory they are experimenting to prove.

They cover your 1st topic fine (read only 1st and 2nd links from the page. second link was the best in my humble opinion). Your other 3 topics are just required if explaining scientific thought model.

That's a five-page explanation, each by a different author with a unique level of skill. And taken together, a better explanation than five pages written by the one author of median skill. However even more efficient is reading the two best pages, which IMO are

http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs3.htm... and http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs5.htm...

As far as I recall, David Miller's one was actually invented to explain Higgs to Margaret Thatcher hself, the "ex-Prime Minister" in the analogy, back in 1993:

> Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

The best layman explanation for the Higgs Boson : (from the second link on that page)

Higgs proposed that ".. the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. ..... We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg's field, and this is the Higgs boson."

Not being particularly scientifically-minded, I really like the third one, David Miller's:

"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her..."

A perfect analogy given the intended recipient, I thought.

I like that one, too. But then I read the others and they seem to give a totally different picture, like: symmetric pencils falling in space. It is interesting to read how the different physicists visualize and explain this concept.

And with that comment I'd like to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y Physicist Richard Feynman describes an experience where he and a fellow student visualized the elementary concept of counting in different ways... "What we're really doing is having some big translation scheme going on where we're translating what this fellow says into our images."

It’s important to remember that these are not the way that physicists think about the Higgs boson. This is the way they try to explain it without any equation, and not using the words like "Lie Group" or "Gauge invariant". The problem is that explain the Higgs bosons in an easy way is very difficult to. (It is like explaining one of the more obscure posts of Raymond Chen to someone that never had seen a computer.)

Last year I took a course about particle physics and we saw the equations of the standard model.

I like more the explanation that involves "pencils". I think that it is possible to expand the non-technical words and get something like the correct theory for Higgs bosons (for example: pencil->vector). In this explanation there are a lot of details missing of course, for example: Why the Z and W particles have different mass? How do the electrons get their mass? What is the difference between the waves that rotate the pencils and the waves that stretch the pencils? I think that these simplifications are sensible to get a short explanation.

I don’t like the explanation that uses viscous forces. The main problem is that with viscous forces the particles "lost" energy and the particles should become still. The real effect of the Higgs field is similar to the apparent effective mass of an object in a fluid. To accelerate the object it is necessary to accelerate some of the fluid that is around it, so it is more difficult and the object have a bigger apparent mass. This is unrelated to the viscosity and happens even when the fluid has no viscosity.

Another problem with this explanation is that the when the particles move they don’t drag any Higgs bosons (real or virtual). So the mental image is wrong. A possible way to see this is that as the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is not zero, the particles can "bounce" against the vacuum and the result is something in the movement equation that looks like a mass. It sounds strange or even ridiculous, but in the problem is not in the equations, but in the "translations" to non-technical words.

no wonder they can't find it. What they describe is pretty much the concept of "aether".

That was what I was thinking too. But then they are saying electromagnetic field actually follows this "aether" like model where it interacts with photons. Now they are trying to prove that the same should be true for Higg's fields too which gives particle mass. Check the second article.

Interesting.

to me any meaningful theory of mass would have inertial and gravitational mass equivalence at its heart (and/or explained immediately and naturally). Higgs mass is just a theoretical workaround to provide for W,Z bosons masses. It is just a descriptive theory, i.e. "it can be thought as if it was happening that way" , i.e. any of the 1 pagers mentioned can itself replace the actual Higgs mass theory, and we'll still would have the same result, incl. that now we would be looking for and not able to find the pensils suspended in the vacuum instead of Higgs boson.

  similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field [..]

That explanation just lost 90% of its audience, who have no clear conception of what an 'electromagnetic field' is. Physicists, including myself, can't help themselves in taking things for granted that their audience really doesn't understand.

Sean Carroll did it in 420 characters:

http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741225250963456

http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741443379920896

http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741774100799488

(Background: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/13/...)

Relevant one-pager on string theory: http://i.imgur.com/MrSHv.gif

Unfortunately, the LHC has not found the Higgs so far, and it's not looking good, with only a narrow window remaining:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3864

Comprehension fail?

>The remaining mass range for the Higgs is the expected one, and, as expected, this is the hardest place to separate the Higgs from the background. If it’s really there, the data collected during the rest of this year should be enough to give a statistically significant signal.

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