What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe
symmetrymagazine.org
symmetrymagazine.org
Pop-sci pieces tend to portray the universe as just a bunch of particles interacting in odd/spooky ways. It's a little reductive and sort of enshrines entanglement and similar concepts as unknowable at times. I skimmed this and it seems to spend a lot of time on spin 0 particles. Who knows, maybe that's a constraint from ER=EPR? But I didn't feel like it really conveys much about Higgs.
(Which would serve a purpose - "oh you can't know it so please come back for next installment in my series of 10 books describing it." I don't think any authors actually set out with that as a goal, explicitly, but they could do a better pointing out where to go for further, more complicated edification. That sort of thing could shoehorn new talent into science.)
As one YouTube commenter put it so aptly, I always looked forward to "snack time with Lenny".
Thanks for pointing out the youtube playlist-only search option -- that should be handy.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6i60qoDQhQGaGbbg-4aSwXJv...
If I find myself watching a lot of the same genre I create a "watch later" for that subject.
'Spooky action at a distance'[0]
[0] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2015/11/nist-team-prov...
My journey with "serious" physics starts with his lectures (I was curious what I needed to know to be able to render my own black holes like in interstellar).
The standard model isn’t some single theory that was devised and survived testing. It’s an amalgam of various ideas which have survived experimental verification. It’s a bit hollow IMO to say it “predicts” things. It’s a bit like drawing the dartboard after throwing the darts.
It predicts things as-yet-unseen, also, such as detailed proton structure, precision atomic matrix elements, detailed nuclear structure and decay rates, and so on.
Note that the standard model did NOT predict neutrino mass. Though it did predict that neutrino mass would explain the shortfall of observed neutrinos from the Sun.
* gravity * massive neutrinos * dark matter * dark energy
It is also a highly parameterised model tuned to fit the data.
The biggest concern is whether we can realistically probe the failings of the standard model using a collider at ~TeV scale? If that is the case, then the standard model may be the best model of particle physics we will ever achieve.
But yeah, I agree that the "highly parameterized" part is a statement from fashion, and the number of parameters is really not a good reason to try to replace the Standard Model. (There are many good reasons, but this one isn't one of them.)
Also, I am yet to see any alternative proposal with fewer parameters.
Fine tuning, I agree, is a philosophical issue. I'm a physicist, and I don't buy it. Why does everything have to be perturbatively pleasant? Nobody promised us that.
The issue of artificial parameters is a red herring, I think. Properly computed, of course, well-defined observables are renormalization scale independent. You might have to pick a scheme/scale to do the calculation, but whatever scale dependence remains is an indication of some perturbative truncation. The continuum limit of LQCD, for example, produces real observables with no renormalization scale dependence. Hell, renormalization is not even mysterious in a computational approach.
You missed a bit of detail: Reality, and The Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Granted, this is often not a popular topic of discussion (if not ~taboo), but it's actually rather important imho.
The best thing I've ever come across that illustrates the gap/difference between how materialists think about reality vs (some) "non-materialists" (in this case Tibetan Buddhist Alan Wallace) is this video....seeing the way two highly competent but very different thinkers approach the problem space is enlightening, although it might require some background in both domains to appreciate (so Alan's case doesn't appear as "woo woo").
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist (Sean Carroll)
Nobody likes it. It's ugly as hell. Physicists, dreaming of some perfect symmetry driving the universe forwards all recoil in horror. Everybody thinks ot must be possible to make something better.
Problem is, the monster works. After tuning a short list of parameters, it survives everything we can throw at it. We have trouble calculating the consequences, but that's not a failing of the model
From my understanding (/me not a physicist), it is rare. It's created only in high-energy situations, and decays extremely quickly. In the very beginning, there were a lot of them, but not for long.
I gleaned from the article that the field is everywhere; I think it's correct to say that all fields are everywhere, but according to the article the Higgs field is distinctive: "The Higgs field has a nonzero vacuum expectation value throughout all of spacetime, meaning there is always some value associated with it, even when no Higgs particles are present."
I guess, FSVO "present". If there were no Higgs particles anywhere, would the Higgs field disappear? I have no idea.
> If there were no Higgs particles anywhere
...which is counterfactual, if you mean "anywhere in spacetime", because there were a lot of Higgs particles, at the very beginning; and those particles exist in spacetime. If there are no Higgs particles in spacetime, that's a different Universe. I guess (/me not a physicist).
There are two equivalent ways to represent the universe:
1) The average value of the Higgs field is zero and there is a HUGE amount of Higgs bosons everywhere, but all the calculations are horribly^1000000 difficult.
2) The average value of the Higgs field is a constant that is not zero and there are very few Higgs bosons here and there, and the calculations are easy [1].
Obviously physicist prefer the second description, in spite both are equivalent.
There are some technical problems if you imagine that there is a constant everywhere in the universe, and has exactly the same value [2]. So the solution is that it has the "constant" has an average value and allow local variations. The local variations are the Higgs bosons, because the field is quantized.
In a universe where the average value of the Higgs boson is not zero, but there are no Higgs bosons, you get the same technical problems that were solved with the idea of Higgs.
[1] It's easy if you have a PhD in physics, a few years of specialization. I can't do them, but I know people that can.
[2] There are other constants anyway, but they are different... I have no better way to explain it :(.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-Higgs-bosons-have-been-observ...
“The Higgs field, on the other hand, is just as spinless as the Higgs boson. Like a college senior sitting forlorn in a career counselor’s office, it has no direction”.