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Comment by archgoon | Hacker News Reader

So there are 5 observed bosons, and one postulated graviton.

The strong force is associaed with the gluon.

The Electromagnetism gets the photon.

The Weak force gets the Z and W+/- bosons.

Gravity gets the graviton, but that's mostly a placeholder since we don't know how to properly model gravitational effects with QFT.

Higgs doesn't get associated with a force (yet).

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There are 8 gluons, in fact.

There is not very good reason why the Higgs interaction is not called a force. I wouldn't read too much into it, tradition carries a lot of weight in how people call things.

We could even measure the attractive force it generates: jhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05087

That’s news to me. Are you saying the Higgs boson can create a force that accelerates particles in a direction? How does that work?

Kind of the opposite though right? As in it dampens acceleration in any direction?

Yes, the Higgs boson results in an attractive force between fermions given by the Yukawa potential (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukawa_interaction).

This potential takes basically the same form as the gravitational potential but with an additional exponential decay with distance due to the mass of the boson. Resulting in short-range interactions. So yes, in very short distances (~(inverse of the Higgs mass) ~ 10^-18 m) fermions do experience an attractive force between them due to the Higgs interaction.

It works in exactly the same manner the rest of interactions work, the boson (Higgs) is the mediator of the force.

Probably due to inertia

It's not that hard to model gravity with a QFT, there are so many ways to do quantum gravity now. The problem is deciding which one is right and the answer to that might involve looking inside a black hole or at energy scales of 10^19 GeV, length scales of 10^-35m, etc.

In the classical sense of "a QFT" then no there are no ways to do QG. The computations diverge. In the extended sense where you let yourself include non-QFT-like things like strings and spin foams, then sure.

But the fact that the computation diverges is not a problem by itself. All QFT diverge but this can be fixed by renormalisation. Problem is that for gravity this would require infinity many parameters and the theory could match any observation

My understanding was that renormalization only needs "parameters" when the computational methods are approximate.

I thought the issue was more that we have no idea how to perform appropriate calculations for SM+QG? Maybe I'm wrong?

for those following, LHC reached 13 TeV which is 15 orders of magnitude smaller than 10^19 GeV

Incompleteness theorem implies none of them are “right” in a “one true axiomatic model” kind of way.

Each is “right” so long as they are consistent with our consensus driven glyph system that exists to normalize discussion, and should never be taken as a 1:1 model of reality.

The glyph systems are not a pipe.

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