A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass | Hacker News Reader

A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass

quantamagazine.org

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The bleeding edge of science has gotten so complex, I'm starting to worry we don't have enough people who understand even a fraction of it. Quantum mechanics is confusing enough as it is, but now we're getting into hidden dimensions and fields that go way beyond this. Has it always been like this? How many people in the world actually understand this stuff?

At one time I was in a physics program at university until I discovered that I couldn't understand physics. I changed to computer science ;-). My experience, though, was that most people I talked to had only a cursory understanding of actual physics. What they really understood was the math.

Like I said, I sucked pretty badly at physics but my impression is that people tend to jump back and forth between imagining the physics, modelling it in math, making predictions based on the math, imagining again what the physics would look like, ad infinitum. So for complex problems, I don't think anyone has a whole physics problem in their head at once and are reasoning about it at that level. They just have pieces and use the math as a way of swapping parts of the problem in and out of their head (if that makes any sense).

I think that's one of the biggest problems with popular descriptions of physics. It doesn't make any sense without the math, but average people don't have the math background. So the descriptions make absolutely no sense. Often you get people who are interested in the physics (but without training) imagining all sorts of crazy things because they have built their understanding on these kinds of nonsense descriptions.

It's been this way for quite a long time. Newton had use new mathematical techniques (calculus) to understand things like the force of gravity. Even if you go back to Archimedes, I wonder how much of his reasoning about density was based on modelling it with math and how much was based on intuition about the physical universe.

>At one time I was in a physics program at university until I discovered that I couldn't understand physics. I changed to computer science ;-). My experience, though, was that most people I talked to had only a cursory understanding of actual physics. What they really understood was the math.

The science fiction author, Jerry Pournelle, who has a measured IQ of 180, once complained to Richard Feynman, "I don't understand quantum mechanics." Feynman replied, "That's okay, Jerry; neither do I."

It could be said that nobody truly understands quantum mechanics, for the simple reason that human beings evolved to live under classical physics. Like any other scientific field, however, this doesn't preclude us from conducting experiments and studying the mathematical laws that model the results. In this respect, it doesn't make any difference if we have an intuitive understanding or not.

By that reasoning, nobody understands classical physics either. Aristotle's model of gravitation survived for a couple thousand years, basically uncontested.

I get pretty irritated when people say nobody can or does understand quantum physics. Your intuition does no better with classical physics, or any other physics. You build an intuition through study. Almost none of us would probably even be able to discover conservation of momentum without it being laid out by someone else.

And this is what I said above, we can achieve a form of understanding by using experiments and a theoretical foundation to explain the results.

Mathematicians use the universe to think about math; physicists use math to think about the universe.

Most physicists don't "understand math" in a way that a mathematician would recognize, but rather use math as a natural language (with all the dialectical oddities that implies) to help us think about physical reality. When we get too enamoured of the math, we go off the rails, because the universe isn't very good at math and doesn't obey most equations very well (thus the reason most wave equations require us to throw away half the mathematically allowed but physically forbidden solutions from of the off, for example.)

This is why the search for "naturalness" has been such a loser. Elegance and naturalness are attributes of our descriptions, not attributes of the universe we describe. Newton's laws aren't in any sense "natural": they are counter-intuitive and weird. Einstein's equations even moreso.

Mathematically-minded physicists convince themselves of the "naturalness" of these descriptions and go out seeking the same quality, but they fail to realize that it is something that is bolted on afterwards. Using it is a guide will very rarely work (the Dirac equation is arguably the one time it ever has, which is an equation that actually seems to describe the universe without any extra bits left over.)

Archimedes actually did write about how he'd switch between physical and formal reasoning, and his account even survived to today (barely): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_of_Mechanical_Theore...

Perhaps, but this has been the case for a long time. Maxwell-Faraday Equations, differential geometry and curvature tensors for general relativity, matrix mechanics and operators for quantum mechanics.

Most of the past physics seems much simpler partly because the teaching methods and more direct derivations have been developed in the large span of time since they were discovered.

For a background about the physics discussed, check out The Pool-Table Analogy with Axion Physics http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9506229

At least when concepts like the curvature of space-time are discussed, I can intuitively conduct thought experiments. When we start talking about the Higgs and shit, I just cry, because I really want to viscerally understand.

"Different fundamental particles are like a crowd of people running through mud. Some particles, like quarks, have big boots that get covered with lots of mud; others, like electrons, have little shoes that barely gather any mud at all. Photons don’t wear shoes—they just glide over the top of the mud without picking any up. And the Higgs field is the mud."

...and that breaks down so utterly when you consider inertia. Specifically, "bodies in motion tend to remain in motion". The math works, but the mental model doesn't. Almost nothing at the scales that need a quantum explanation can be adequately represented by monkeys who evolved to understand bananas. We can pretend to. We can give names to phenomena; call them particles and fields and so forth. We can make sense of the math. We can make accurate predictions. But when we really consider the implications of those things we claim to understand, we're forced to admit that we really don't understand them at all. It's turtles all the way down, and it turns out that the turtles aren't really there at all (for any reasonable definition of really).

Related: a SixtySymbols video on axion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VxcTXud-Tg

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