Why the Higgs Field Is Nothing Like Molasses, Soup, or a Crowd
profmattstrassler.com
profmattstrassler.com
I think phibs, or more generally science-fibs, are mostly harmless and useful. These are mostly introduced at high school level where a simplified (even if flawed) explanation of something can at least give a rough understanding, and introduction to scientific thought process. Better to go through life thinking that color perception is based on light frequencies, and evolution selecting more-fit individuals, than to have no appreciation of how the world works.
I suppose "Higgs soup" is particularly bad in not being a simplified version of the truth, just a poor mental model, but the topic is so esoteric that it seems harmless.
For simpler and more accessible topics though, like the examples I gave, I do think there is value in teaching partially-correct simplifications. For one thing, you have to start somewhere, so if some partial understanding is what sparks some kid's interest into pursuing the sciences, then that is a good thing.
Maybe more importantly(?), given that most people won't be going into science-based jobs, is just having some base level of scientific literacy, especially in a world (particularly the USA) where religious belief and conspiracy theories, rather than rational thought, seem to be in danger of dominating society.
>trying to explain things like quantum physics to the layman (as if scientists themselves really understand it)
There's this common misconception that physicists somehow don't understand quantum mechanics. The problem with quantum mechanics (and a whole host of other experimentally-supported theories) is that they describe things so completely removed from our everyday experience (and indeed, occur in regimes that human beings have never experienced even indirectly until the last 100 or so years) that our everyday intuition is wrong every time.
But if you understand the math of quantum mechanics, and you understand how the experiments relate to the math, then you understand how quantum mechanics works. Its not actually that complicated, its just weird.
There are ~1900 PhDs in physics awarded every year, so certainly, tens of thousands of people across the world do understand how it works. Now, if you're going to quibble and say "do the scientists understand what spin really is?" then congratulations, you've just reinvented Humean skepticism, I guess human knowledge reached its maximum extent in 1748.
OK, but is that really understanding, or just an ability to crank the handle of the model and make a prediction? How should we interpret what is going on? What to make of observational wave function collapse, or long-distance quantum entanglement (which seems completely at odds with our understanding of space and time)?
My view is that, as it pertains to any theory, the ability to make reasonably accurate predictions within a given region, and reasonably accurately describe the region where those predictions are correct is understanding.
I don't believe our knowledge is complete, because the universe is effectively infinite, so there's room for effectively infinite combinations and permutations of phenomenon even within our understanding. But when we encounter something that contradicts our understanding, that doesn't mean we didn't understand anything we experienced before. It just means that our overall understanding was incomplete.
I think his description of the nature of explanations is relevant here though. Most phenomena, that one might like explained, or wish to understand, aren't as irreducible (at least in terms of things familiar to the questioner) as the fundamental forces!
In terms of education, explaining things at one level of reduction, even if there is more that could be said, meaningfully increases the knowledge of the student (and allows them to ask the next question, should they be interested). This really isn't the same as an analogical "explanation" that in fact explains nothing.
of course, it's easy to say that and hard to come up with good but simple models on the spot, but people don't gain knowledge by learning opaque phrases (that's how we got the whole "quantum woo" epidemic a decade or two ago)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Abelian_Higgs_...
Everything is a model, if you look closely enough. Atoms, electrons, strings, fields, waves, what have you. The only ground truth is “if we try X, then we observe Y reliably”; we naturally tend to make up models (stories) that make sense to us humans as a shortcut to that truth—that’s just how our minds work—but the entities that appear in those models themselves do not gain absolute existence in some objective reality merely from that.
Tomorrow there will be a better model that may look nothing like the current one; there can be multiple conflicting models that fit different purposes; and if the incompleteness theorem is right then it shall continue forever as we cannot ever build a single provably correct and complete model of the system from within that system. The point of a map is that it does not span the entire extent of the territory.
-George Box
I'd go further and say that many "theories of everything" that try to remove context from the models, in fact obscure the fundamentally useful approximations. Unless you really need that complicated model for the last fractional percent accuracy, leave it out! Also, knowing (or controlling) the context withing the model is being used is often critical to making something work well for a reasonable cost in a reasonable time.
For example, plumbers just ballpark the pressure of water due to elevation to "half a PSI per foot". Their 1/2psi "model" gets them close enough without making them use a calculator. Their 1/2psi "model" gets them close enough, with an appropriate safety factor built-in, without making them use a calculator. Even though really it's much closer to 0.433psi per foot of water column.
But really it's much closer to (((((aT+b)*T+c)*T+d)*T+e)*t+f)/(1+h*T) * g * 0.3048 * 0.453592 psi per foot of water column depending on what the temperature is and what gravity is where you are. And for further precision you'd need to integrate this equation with respect to T and gravity along the height of the water column, or use an even more precise model because the constants a through h are still doing a lot of "heavy-lifting" hiding and abstracting away other hard-to-measure physics phenomena. You'd also have to adjust for impurities in the water, as that will change the density as well at these precisions. It also only applies to water that's not moving, moving water will have a lower psi per foot due to friction.
Obviously plumbers certainly wouldn't find it useful to have to replace their "half-a-psi-per-foot" mantra with something involving an equation to determine the density of water (generally considered incompressible anyways) as a function of its temperature. The amount of situations which need the more complex models are very few and far between.
But we do still need them! A "theory of everything" would be fantastically wonderful for opening up generation and validation of new, useful, rules-of-thumb for many scientists and engineers.
T = temperature of water in C
a=-2.8054253⋅10^-10
b=1.0556302⋅10^-7
c=-4.6170461⋅10^-5
d=0.0079870401
e=16.945176
f=999.83952
g=9.81 m/s^2 (variable depending on where you are on or off the planet)
h=0.01687985
It would certainly open many new avenues to explore, and potentially bring lots of innovation.
However, to prove it you would need infinite resources and infinite time—in other words, you will never prove it, so within the framework of physics you will not assume it is complete and correct and absolute truth.
But there are people who will assume just that, they’ll see how well it works and what progress it brings and say “that’s it guys, we have finally arrived at truth!” When they see something that doesn’t fit in the model (say, consciousness or free will), they will say it doesn’t exist and influence policy decisions based on that. When they see someone using another theory or even suggesting there can be others, they will ridicule them.
As map is never the territory, any model is always going to be a local maximum, and a particularly high local maximum followed by a steep trough might make it difficult to reach the next one.
wait, is it not?
> evolution selecting more-fit individuals
Do you mean that it is simplification from "more-fit individuals are more likely but not certain to be selected"?
yes it is. in some form. specifically, in model form.
most things are modeled by our heads. our culture, for the most part, teaches all of us how to do this.
so i'm saying color is a lot more like "flavor", or "texture" in a broad sense.
the funkiest difference is that in the frequency viewpoint, color is linear. however in color theory it's a wheel!
What frequency is magenta?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm...
So, since magenta is a mix of red and blue, our "red" and "blue" cones will be most active, but also our "green" cones since its frequency sensitivity also includes red and blue.
Some people have 4 types of color cones, not 3, and can therefore differentiate colors (mixes of light frequencies) that normal people can't.
But, anyways, our brains neural inputs when seeing various colors does not directly correspond to how we perceive them.
Here's a classic illusion. The strawberries in this photo are not red.
https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascina...
This has to do with "color constancy" - we learn to see the same object in different lighting conditions as being the same color, even thought the light frequencies reflected may be different.
We basically see what we predict we'll see.
Evolution really acts on populations, not individuals, and often it's more about the environment changing than the population. Basically isolated populations of a species interbreed and (as a population) accumulate genetic changes as long as they are mostly benign. Then, once in a while ("punctuated equilibrium") something in the environment changes - food supply, pathogen, weather, etc, and some of these long-term accumulated changes (maybe collectively) suddenly become important and result in one population surviving/thriving better than another.
"is based directly on light frequencies with no other transformation" would be wrong
Another simple experiment that proves this is when you put on color tinted sunglasses or ski goggles - initially everything will seem color tinted, then after a while colors go back to normal.
It's not just color - the whole idea that our eye works kind of like a camera and what we see is what is is really there is wrong. There have also been experiments done with prism-based inverting goggles that make everything look upside down... It turns out that after you've worn them for a while then everything flips the right way back up again and looks normal to you, even though the googles didn't change.
"Color" also can refer to several different phenomena which were historically conflated in a way that made teasing apart certain observations difficult. It's a property of objects (apples are red), a property of light (lasers are red) and a property of perception (I see red).
E.g:
Higgs-fire: burning mass to generate time/gravity ...
I really like how unlike other science communicators in many of his articles he assumes you have some university level education. It explains concepts I have not found outside actual textbooks but in a way that is very understandable to an engineer such as myself.
> But it did fit quite well in a course for non-experts, in which I had several hours to lay out the basics of particle physics before addressing the Higgs field’s role.
So, no known better concise explanation then. Maybe it's worth workshopping a _less_ incorrect explanation which resolves some but not all of the primary criticisms, so there's something useful to say to people who aren't prepared to sit through a book or several hours of a course?
Say: "You know how, if you push your potato bit around in your soup, it starts to slow and eventually stops when you stop pushing it? We could plot the speed of the potato bit over time, and we'd notice that as soon as we stopped pushing, the potato bit's speed drops to zero. The Higgs field has a similar effect on an object's acceleration as the soup has on the potato bit's speed. How much the field affects the object's acceleration apparently defines the object's mass. I say "apparently", because the exact way the mass is defined is incompatible with this simplistic analogy. But as we can see with the potato bit in the soup, the effective 'soup mass' of the potato bit is a complicated function of the things around it, as well as the bit's intrinsic characteristics."
...
As a physicist by training, who once held ambitions to teach this stuff, I'm frequently very frustrated by people criticizing how physics is taught through (frequently very flawed) analogies, or via toy models. And part of my frustration is that the people who make these criticisms never had to try to teach the information to anyone who needed to know it. Its very easy to give a technically correct, fantastically nuanced, and perfectly incoherent-to-the-layman account of just about anything in physics. While a sufficiently focused student can derive all of known electromagnetic theory (including relativistic phenomena) just from Maxwell's equations, the standard graduate-level textbook on electrodynamics weighs more than 3 pounds, because that simplicity of expression is deeply misleading.
Part of why Feynman's elementary physics lectures were so popular amongst his peers was because he had a way of picking analogies that cast light into the shadows created by the biases from their own years of study. But if you aren't already inculcated to the vagaries of physics nomenclature, even Feynman, the most celebrated physics educator of the modern era, is hard to parse. You MUST develop the intuitions of a physicist to understand what makes his introductory lectures so insightful. So when Feynman says "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.", it's less an expression of how poorly he understands it, but rather an expression of how "can I explain this in under an hour to a disinterested 19 year old?" is a really poor a metric of understanding. Granted, there's a ton of background knowledge baked into the observation that "spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics" (in that incident that caused the quote). Its ultimately a pretty trivial calculation, once you understand how statistical mechanics is derived, but getting to that point is not at all trivial.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/04/267-...
I also enjoyed the writing style; ordered the book. Curious to see how technical the explanations are there :)
I've not read his book, but seeing an endorsement by Sean Carroll (a great physics communicator I've seen a few times on the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols), I'm very tempted to get a copy.
So the mass is more like a property of objects? That's mind-blowing!
(But well, there's a "then explain gravity!" that you can throw at any generic explanation.)
Rest mass is a fixed quantity inherent to the object), weight changes based on the environment/reference frame -- your weight is different on the moon, but your mass is the same.
Matter is just perturbations in a variety of fields that have complex interactions with each other -- those interactions are what give rise to mass. the higgs field is one of the fields that create mass, most importantly in electrons, but when you measure the mass of any full sized object, almost all of the mass has nothing to do with the higgs field and has to do with the fact that protons are actually balls of quarks and gluons moving very rapidly in a confined space because of their self interactions.
His old content is great though.
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
Because of the simple interaction between the S and Z fields with strength y, a non-zero equilibrium value S0 for the S field gives the Z quantum a mass proportional both to y and to S0.
The S field’s non-zero value has given mass to the particle of the Z field!
I wish he would have mentioned if the Z field is related to the Z boson:
https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/z-b...
The Z’s don’t hang around very long. Being so heavy, they decay into all kinds of things: quarks, muons, neutrini, you name it! Like the W’s, they appear for something like 3x10^-25 seconds before decaying. A photon can’t even get across a proton that quickly.
Why I worry about this is because the gluon in the strong force is self-interacting:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-finall...
Which suggests to me that it's actually two or more things that are each not self-interacting. But the noncontextual terminology and thick notation of particle physics leads one to stop at the notion of a gluon and not question its oddities, or never arrive at understanding it in the first place. So here we get distracted by trying to remember names rather than coming up with better models for what happens in the span of light crossing a proton, which we can't see anyway.
I just feel more and more that bigger accelerators aren't going to solve this stuff, because the real problem is that only a few dozen scientists in the world actually understand quantum mechanics. Its sort of like how tensors are hard to reason about, and maybe it's worth scrapping them and going back to matrices holding various types because that's more approachable for humans. I would compare the problem to how the use of single letters for variable names made C code in the 1990s harder to read than Javascript today. I wish we had the time, money and resources to refactor physics so that more people could be involved with brainstorming. Short of that, I'm hopeful that AI will summarize this stuff so that we can work with it more like, I dunno, geometry.
Everybody immediately lost interest in the subject when we realized we were all being played. The authors of the books and scientists who received the funding are all richer than before, but we're no closer to knowing where atomic mass comes from.
CERN and the Large Hadron Collider - <JoeRogan>sometimes I don't know man!</JoeRogan> My conspiracy gears start turning knowing how many billions of dollars have flowed into this project with relatively little innovation & discovery coming out of it.
This article both: 1) Acknowledges that previous Higgs claims aren't true and 2) Descopes the role of the Higgs away from its "God" like mass-giving properties and to something a lot more niche and speculative:
> "In fact, the Higgs field only generates the masses of the known elementary particles. More complex particles such as protons and neutrons — and therefore the atoms, molecules, humans and planets that contain them — get most of their mass in another way."
So atoms, molecules, humans and planets - anything you can actually observe and test doesn't get its mass from the Higgs. Only invisible stuff that you can only see at CERN works that way?
It's too bad this work is not generally observable, testable, falsifiable, and that it requires a $5 billion black box and literal nobles to even conduct experiments (don't worry, they're planning a $25 billion one by 2038).
And besides... "soup"? "molasses"? These sound so dreary, might as well call it "cosmic porridge". They should call it the King Particle and say that it "bestowes" mass unto the particles by Divine Right - that should make everyone happy.
However, the mass of the electron is measurable, and the mass of a mole of water for example would be measurably different if the electron had 0 mass. And since the electron is not made up of anything, its mass can't be explained by the same mass-energy equivalence. The same is true for the mass of quarks, which do account for a tiny but measurable fraction of the mass of the proton and neutron.
There were also other possible explanations for these masses. The Higgs was not the only candidate theory for this. So, the LLC achieved a monumental task: it confirmed which theory accurately accounts for the mass of these particles, and proved that the final piece of the Standard Model puzzle is now known.
A few things that stood out in your rebuttal:
> E=mc2
Isn't this mass-energy equivalence, not a theory about why atoms have mass in the first place? Thought it was called "The God Particle" because it set out to explain "how particles got their mass" - AKA where material reality comes from, not a theory like E=mc2 at all?
> both quarks and electrons are measurable yet have 0 mass
Isn't there a wave:particle duality not just of light but all subatomic particles such that it can't be proven they are particles ("mass") at all but just motion propagation ("energy")?
> proved that the final piece of the Standard Model
Did it really? This theory says that the world is ultimately particles doesn't it?
> it confirmed which theory accurately accounts for the mass of these particles
With the molasses analogy it did that? How do you figure?
Great discussion! Love this topic.
"[...] Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle [...]"
> Isn't there a wave:particle duality not just of light but all subatomic particles
yes (and not just sub-atomic ones. You can also have this for molecules).
> such that it can't be proven they are particles ("mass") at all but just motion propagation ("energy")?
no.
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The mass of a system can be said to be [the energy of the system in the reference frame in which it has the least energy]/c^2.
So, an individual photon has 0 mass, because if you change reference frames, the amount of energy can be arbitrarily close to zero. But, if you have a collection of photons with a total momentum of zero, then you can assign that collection of photons a non-zero mass.
(See the thought experiment about a nearly-massless box whose interior is all perfect mirrors, and where the total energy of the photons bouncing around inside it, is high.)
------------
> With the molasses analogy it did that?
Not via that analogy, no. By the actual math.
How is anything "proven" with math alone? No observable evidence needed, really?
Math may help model and explain things we can already observe, but I've never heard of math discovering things that are not observed, and it being called "proof".
Because obviously you can model a lot more than what's physically possible in a language like math, like for example the impossible case of an infinite number of oranges. In math I can even say "Infinity + 1" and it counts (literally). And have more oranges than what's in your infinity crate. Doesn't mean it's real or "proof" of anything in the real world. Doesn't the observation come first, and the math just explains what was observed?
> Doesn't the observation come first, and the math just explains what was observed?
and feel the need to point out that math for Pluto's rough position came first and directed observers (roughly) where to look; that math for symmetry groups and permutations came first and then real world applications in crypto came later; that math for non Euclidean geometry was worked upon before physical observations suggested Newton wasn't exactly correct in his mechanics and Einstein got hyperbolic about lightspeed.
Math can come along before any observations are made that might suggest the math has application .. there was at least one mathematician in history that expressed a dread that their work might find an application (eg: in war, etc).
But the math wasn't proof that Pluto existed, it wasn't proven until it was discovered.
Clearly this isn't always true, nor straightforward as the two can be intertwined in an iterative feedback.
In other cases math theory domains can exist for decades prior to any observations that call upon those domains to expand or produce an applicable description for physicists or others.
What that guy above said about E=mc^2 was random nonsense that has nothing to do with this story, like a lot of people on this site he's in Jordan Peterson fashion just randomly asserting like a know-it-all with no thought behind the statements or proof to back them up. Despite his high score here you can safely ignore what he said about completing the Standard Model (billiard ball hypothesis) it doesn't, Standard Model is still incomplete, and there's no proof that subatomic structures even exist as particles - let alone all the subsequent theories predicated on that.
> Clearly this isn't always true
In what case can you say there is proof something exists without having any observable evidence for it - even if the math "checks out"? What - dark matter? Ghosts?
But that is not what I said! Do not put words in my mouth.
I didn’t say that the math “proved” it.
I was saying that the molasses analogy did not matter to what they did, and that the math, not the molasses thing, is the relevant thing they did.
Specifically, the math model described an origin for the mass of some things.
> In math I can even say "Infinity + 1" and it counts (literally). And have more oranges than what's in your infinity crate.
No, actually. Adding 1 to an infinite cardinality (I assume you are talking about cardinality because you speak of a number of oranges) results in the same cardinality. That is pretty close (but not quite) the definition of a cardinality being infinite. (Specifically, a common definition is that a set is infinite if it is in bijection with a strict subset of itself)
Did you read his book? I'm considering it... This blog entry refers the reader to the book for an actual explanation. Annoyed me a bit since I was hoping to find an explanation in the blog entry itself. He says it's too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...
The only meaningful question around phenomena and meaning is the connection between the two.
Is mind a property of reality or emergent accident? Is matter a figment of mind or is mind a figment of matter?
If that is not what is being sought, beyond that metaphysical query the only reasonable search for meaning behind phenomena is to understand the limits to thought that a conceptual model presents the researchers, so as to avoid dead ends in research direction.