Higgs Boson

[belovelife]

......In a much-hyped announcement yesterday (July 4) from the world's largest atom smasher,

 

the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, scientists reported evidence of a new "Higgs-like" particle

 

with roughly 125 times the mass of the proton.

 

............

 

 

 

how can a sub-atomic particle have more mass that the particle it makes?

 

am i missing something?

[tommtomm]

Good point! And don't worry, no one else has the answer to that, because there is no good answer to it. When Modern Physics' house of cards collapses, all will be laughing at and pointing to the naked emperors!

[CraigD]

My grasp of the Higgs mechanism is appallingly poor, but I can answer this one! :)

 

how can a sub-atomic particle have more mass that the particle it makes?

First, elemental particles with mass aren’t made out of particles that “carry” the Higgs mechanism/interaction/field. Elemental particles interact with the Higgs field via the particles that carry it.

 

A rough analogy:

An airplane gets lift from air, but isn’t made of air.

Airplane = elemental particle with nonzero mass

Air = bosons

 

The Higgs boson isn’t what actually interacts with particles to “give them mass”. Those are Goldstone bosons.

 

Goldstone bosons, however, can’t be unambiguously detected by experiments like the recent ones at the LHC.

 

Theory predicts, however, that the Higgs mechanism can “leave behind” a particle not involved in giving elementary particle mass. The Higgs boson is such a particle, and it can, and has (pending additional experiments – not all its predicted qualities have yet been experimentally verified), been detected by the recent experiments.

 

Here’s a rough analogy:

There’s a theory that hypothesizes that things get damp because of water vapor.

However, nobody has a device that can directly detect the tiny molecules of water vapor.

Instead, the theory also predicts that, under certain exact conditions, water vapor will produce a big drop of water, which can be detected.

Goldstone bosons = undetectable water vapor molecules

Higgs bosons = big drops of water

 

Please be mindful that this physics is over my head. Precisely what is meant above by “leave behind” is beyond my present comprehension.

[belovelife]

the video looks like oover half of the hydrogen went right throught eachother, defending the matter/antinmatter impetali process

 

what do you think

 

 

mabe this video could give a ruff estimate of the amount of nuclei that were "on" at the same time

 

and somehow work out a rate frequency for the impetali process

 

not super accurate, but based on a percent, it could give some probability stats

[CraigD]

the video looks like oover half of the hydrogen went right throught eachother, defending the matter/antinmatter impetali process

 

what do you think

 

Belovelife, “impetali” is a term of your invention you use in a collection of musings that’s never been adopted by anyone who can or is willing to attempt to present them as a scientific theory. Because your ideas on the subject lack credible scientific support, threads about them, such as Belovelife's unification Theory, were moved to the strange claims forum.

 

Please try to keep to the subject of the thread you started here, which is the Higgs boson, a prediction of the Standard Model. Don’t keep bringing up unsupported ideas from the strange claims forum in the non-strange forums. :naughty:

[Guest MacPhee]

 

The Higgs boson isn’t what actually interacts with particles to “give them mass”. Those are Goldstone bosons.

 

Goldstone bosons, however, can’t be unambiguously detected by experiments like the recent ones at the LHC.

 

Theory predicts, however, that the Higgs mechanism can “leave behind” a particle....

 

Please be mindful that this physics is over my head. Precisely what is meant above by “leave behind” is beyond my present comprehension.

 

Modern so-called physics, is beyond anyone's comprehension. The "Higgs" was supposed to be the ultimate particle, which would explain everything. Now there's yet another one - the "Goldstone"! When will this be detected?

 

Such a seemingly endless sucession of "particles" can't make sense. It must mean there's something fundamentally wrong with our ideas. The Universe can't be that silly, surely.

 

Obviously, no-one wishes to cast aspersions on the worthy scientists at the LHC. Or suggest, that they have no idea what's going on. Or that they feel under pressure to announce some kind of positive result, in order to justify the huge amounts of public money spent on the LHC.

 

I think tommtomm's earlier post is correct. Particle physics increasingly resembles a shaky house of cards, due for imminent collapse.

Edited July 6, 2012 by MacPhee

[tommtomm]

....I think tommtomm's earlier post is correct. Particle physics increasingly resembles a shaky house of cards, due for imminent collapse.

 

I thank you, MacPhee, and welcome you to the more rational side of this debate. Have you noticed that after each distinct claim, there is a gap where if filled in would show the reporter is trying to explain something which he cannot because it has not yet been explained to she/him such that it was understandable? Those gaps are holes in the "theory" which are the reason it is no more than an idea that Modern Physics jumped on for lack of anything better they can think of.

 

There is no real explanation of just how or why an object having no mass can exist before it acquires its mass, simply because one cannot just ignore the well-accepted facts about inertia. Without mass, objects do not exist except as figments of you-know-what. That is the 1st obstacle no one has yet addressed, but certainly should have been right off. Until that brick wall is torn down, forget about logical discourse.

 

You're correct, too, in saying no one wants to blame good scientists for bad science, but there are so many things wrong today in science that are supported by the evil of enforced conformism that unless we learn to distinguish the naked emperors from the good scientists, our world will suffer from not just the lack of facts, but also from all that the lack of knowledge entails.

Edited July 7, 2012 by tommtomm

[CraigD]

Modern so-called physics, is beyond anyone's comprehension.

There’s a famous quote by Richard Feynman (who was awarded a Nobel prize for QED, a foundation theory of quantum mechanics):

On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

- The Character of Physical Law (1965)

 

Though this quote is actually from a famous lecture, it’s commonly attributed to a conversation between Feynman and an interviewer, (though I’m aware of no clear evidence such a conversation actually occurred, and suspect it’s a fictional invention):

Interviewer: How many people do you think understand the Theory of Relativity?

Feynman: (pauses to think, apparently counting in his head) Oh, perhaps twenty or thirty, mostly physicists and mathematicians.

Interviewer: How many understand quantum machanics?

Feynman: (quickly, laughing) Oh, that’s easy!

Nobody

understands quantum mechanics.

Seriously, though, I think it’s important to avoid the fallacy of concluding that, because you don’t understand something, nobody does.

 

I don’t understand the Higgs mechanism. My education is a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. My academic and professional science experience is a 4-month internship at an optical and radio observatory, and 2 semesters of teaching introductory physical science at an undergraduate college level. Although I’ve tried, with some success, to read and self-educate, I simply don’t have the necessary technical foundations to do the math Feynman, Higgs, or, as Feynman puts it in his lectures, most people who earn PhD’s in Physics, could and can: math that’s necessary to understand the Higgs mechanism in the way that professional physicists interested in it do.

 

Just because I, or you, MacPhee, don’t understand a particular collection of scientific theory, such those necessary to understand the Higgs mechanism, doesn’t prove that nobody does, or that nobody understands any part of modern physics. Many parts of modern physics, such as Relativity, are understood by many people, even ones like me who have had only a few undergraduate classes, and continuing self-education, in it. Although I’m not personally skilled enough to have a credible opinion on the subject, to my knowledge everybody who is acknowledges that physicist such as Higgs and many others understand the theoretical basis of the Higgs mechanism well.

 

What Feynman meant by “nobody understands quantum physics” is not that it’s an elaborate confidence game where nobody actually understands how to perform its calculations, make theoretical predictions, and test them with experiments, but instead preys upon the lack of understanding of the public to pretend to do so. He means that nobody understands it in the same intuitive, gut-level way one “understands” how to walk, run, throw and catch a ball, etc.

 

I believe it’s a serious error to assume that what cannot be understood on this level can’t be understood at all, or that understanding other than gut-level must be false.

 

The "Higgs" was supposed to be the ultimate particle, which would explain everything.

Let’s clear up a common and troublesome misconception: detecting the Higgs particle was and is not theorized by any credible physicist or physics enthusiast to “explain everything”.

 

In the 1950s, Yoichiro Nambu, Jeffrey Goldstone, and others developed a quantum mechanical theory for a mechanism by which the mass of the elementary particles (which would, in the 1960s and ‘70s be consolidated into the Standard Model) could be explained via an interaction with massless bosons, rather than requiring that mass be a fundamental quantity, as it is in classical physics. They did not, however (at least not widely and publically) apply this work to reach this conclusion, but rather focused on more abstract, immediate theoretical implications.

 

This early theoretical work was unable to make testable predictions. In the 1960s, Higgs and others were able to extend it to describe the Higgs mechanism, with its explanation of mass, and further, to make a testable prediction: the existence of the Higgs boson.

 

It took nearly 50 years to develop the necessary experimental technology to perform this test: the LHC, though the Tevatron, completed in 1983, was arguably powerful enough, had its instrument been upgraded sufficiently.

 

Now there's yet another one - the "Goldstone"! When will this be detected?

First, recognize that I didn’t say the Goldstone boson, but a Goldstone boson! Various theories have various very different Goldstone bosons in them.

 

Next, note that although you man not have encountered the term until recently, a specific Goldstone boson isn’t “yet another particle” only recently described in the scientific literature. They’ve been in the literature for over 50 years.

 

As to when – and more importantly, how - a Goldstone boson will or can be detected, to the best of my knowledge, they can’t be, directly, even in principle, by any reasonable conceivable experiment. This is in large part why the detection of the Higgs boson, which was predicted by the same theory that predicts mass-carrying Goldstone bosons, is so important: had the recent experiments failed to find them – a distinct possibility, which various scientists and enthusiasts informally bet would be the case – the theory would have been proven false, and more than a generation of science would be “back to the drawing board” to invent or adopt another theory to explain mass.

 

Such a seemingly endless sucession of "particles" can't make sense. It must mean there's something fundamentally wrong with our ideas. The Universe can't be that silly, surely.

This brings to mind another famous science quote, this one from a couple of generations earlier:

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Like many famous science quotes, this one is commonly misattributed, to astrophysicists Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). While Eddington may have actually said it, it’s certainly attributable, in slightly different form, to geneticist J. B. S. Haldane

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

- Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)

 

Seriously, I think the idea that the universe must conform to our intuitive, gut-level expectation of what is and isn’t “silly”, is a severe fallacy. Science, since it’s arguably renaissance roots, has a history of the acceptance what was once regarded as “silly”, such as the Earth being smaller than and revolving around the Sun. Scientific theory must be supported or refuted by experimental results, not gut-level beliefs about the universe and the laws it exhibits.

 

It’s also important, I think, to understand that particle physics since the late 1960s has not involved an endless succession of particles (what Gell-Mann and Zweig disparagingly termed “the particle zoo”, but rather the opposite: the theoretical explanation of every sort of composite particles and bodies on all scales, from protons to stars, with the small collection of elementary particles of the Standard Model – 7 kinds: photons; leptons; quarks; gluons; W bosons; Z bosons; and finally (in order of experimental confirmation); the Higgs boson.

 

This fewer-is-better approach is ubiquitous to physics, and certainly hasn’t ended with the Standard Model. String theory, for example, attempts to explain everything with a single kind of elementary object (strings). However, these “beyond the Standard Model” theories have so far failed to succeeded in making many testable predictions that were subsequently experimentally tested and found correct.

 

To the amazement of me, and many scientists and enthusiasts, for all its counter-intuitive “silliness”, the Standard Model has been used to make many predictions, and more amazingly, when experimentally tested, those predictions found to be correct.

 

Where the SM most disappoints is explaining the force of gravity, which one might call “the search for the graviton.” Unlike the now (by all acclaim) successful “hunt for the Higgs”, no 50-year old or recent theory show much promise, the prospect of experimentally testing such predictions seems far away.

 

Finally, please be cautioned that, as my grasp of the underlying theory is deficient, my various summaries and explanation may have minor or major errors. This is really a subject best discussed by a real, post-PhD level physicist. We’ve one or two here at hypography, who I’m hoping may show mercy on me and help out in this thread.

[watcher]

how can a sub-atomic particle have more mass that the particle it makes?

 

am i missing something?

 

shouldn't be that's the logical way of thinking it?

that in the hierarchy of particles, the fundamental ones have higher energies?

Edited July 8, 2012 by watcher

[CraigD]

shouldn't be that's the logical way of thinking it?

that in the hierarchy of particles, the fundamental ones have higher energies?

That seems exactly backwards to me.

 

In particle theories of any kind, “particles” can be defined as of 2 kinds:

• Elementary (also called “fundamental”) – those that can’t be taken apart, even in principle, into constituent sub-particles.
  In the Standard model, these include electrons, quarks, and gluons
  
• Composite – those that can.
  In the SM, these include protons and neutrons.
  

Composite particles logically must have higher mass-energy than any one of their constituent sub-particles.

 

For example, the invariant mass (what is gotten via the Higgs mechanism) of a proton is about 1.6726217 x 10^-27 kg. The most massive of its 3 quarks' is about 10^-35 kg, while its constituent gluons have, like photons, zero rest mass, all their effective mass due to their invariant speed of the speed of light.

 

In physics in general (and somewhat mind-bogglingly, for me), any collection of particles may be considered a particle, if such a scheme is useful in describing some phenomena. For example, a phonon is a large, constantly changing collection of atoms describing sound in a solid or liquid. Such particles are sometimes called quasiparticles, to distinguish them from ones with less changing constituent particles.

[belovelife]

so a phnon is the atoms that carry sound at the time the sound is present?

[CraigD]

so a phnon is the atoms that carry sound at the time the sound is present?

Sort of. The phonon isn’t really the atoms themselves, but the emergent phenomena their motion embodies. It’s more than just a convenient name for the phenomena – it is represented using essentially the same mathematical physics used on real elementary particles, like photons, and follows quantum mechanical rules.

 

Phonons have practically nothing to do with the Higgs mechanism. I only mentioned them as an example of how flexible physicists are in their use of the concept of a particle, and how versatile the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics is.

 

I think it’s very important, even if you can’t actually do the math, to understand that what “particle” means, as used by a particle physicist, is not a miniature version of a familiar object like a pool ball, nor some sort of linguistic metaphor: it’s a rigorously mathematical entity. A failure to grasp this distinction, and accept that it’s a legitimate way of representing, understanding, and predicting real phenomena, is I think, the cause of much confusion about physics, and failure to appreciate why, when such mathematical formalism is used to predict a tangible experimental result, and decades later, the needed equipment to perform the experiment are built, and the predicted result occurs, such happiness ensues.

 

I’ve long seen, in the 99%+ of people who can’t do the necessary math (which includes me), a tendency to not simply acknowledge their lack of mathematical skill, but assert that the <1% of people who can and have done the math are either deluding themselves that it has any connection to reality, or perpetuating an elaborate hoax to steal money from the tax-paying citizens who, by way of scientific research grants, pay for a large part of the cost to build equipment like the LHC and run experiments with them. This tendency is the same, I think, as the one that manifests in people believing that the 1960s and ‘70s manned lunar landings were faked, or that the mathematical models used to conclude that deleterious global warming is occurring due to human activity are false and fraudulent.

 

In my ideal world, the pedagogical might of information technology brings every interested person a working understanding of the mathematical physics of the Higgs mechanism and every other aspect of physics, evaporating anti-scientific denialism and conspiracy suspicions like frost under a bright lamp. Alas, I think the real world is far from this ideal, though perhaps not as far as in my gloomiest predictions.

[Guest MacPhee]

CraigD's hugely impressive posts afflict me with a sense of intellectual inferiority. They make me feel like an ant. (I don't mean that sarcastically, but in genuine admiration). I cannot adequately reply to such posts - let other ants rear up against the mighty aardvark, if they dare.

[belovelife]

speaking of ants, they are pretty cool, they communicate through the sense of smell

 

interesting way to talk

 

 

 

besides that, i thought a particle was like a grain of sand

all one piece

 

where an atomic particle would be one piece

 

( or the sum of the parts being one piece)

 

i guess its kinda amibiguous,

 

like bill clintin said, all depends on the meaning of the word (or phrase )

[watcher]

That seems exactly backwards to me.

 

In particle theories of any kind, “particles” can be defined as of 2 kinds:

• Elementary (also called “fundamental”) – those that can’t be taken apart, even in principle, into constituent sub-particles.
  In the Standard model, these include electrons, quarks, and gluons
  
• Composite – those that can.
  In the SM, these include protons and neutrons.
  

Composite particles logically must have higher mass-energy than any one of their constituent sub-particles.

 

For example, the invariant mass (what is gotten via the Higgs mechanism) of a proton is about 1.6726217 x 10^-27 kg. The most massive of its 3 quarks' is about 10^-35 kg, while its constituent gluons have, like photons, zero rest mass, all their effective mass due to their invariant speed of the speed of light.

 

In physics in general (and somewhat mind-bogglingly, for me), any collection of particles may be considered a particle, if such a scheme is useful in describing some phenomena. For example, a phonon is a large, constantly changing collection of atoms describing sound in a solid or liquid. Such particles are sometimes called quasiparticles, to distinguish them from ones with less changing constituent particles.

 

1. then why do we need much more energy in our particle collider to break down the higg's boson.

isn't the rule, the more fundamental a particle, the harder to crack it?

 

2. in string theory, strings as fundamental constituents of matter is packed with enormous energy.

 

3. in Lorentz transformation. .. the sign that a particle is energetic is it vibrates very fast and the wavelengths shrinks. so naturally a fundamental particle must have a very high frequency and very short wavelength.

Edited July 10, 2012 by watcher

[JMJones0424]

...scientists reported evidence of a new "Higgs-like" particle with roughly 125 times the mass of the proton.............how can a sub-atomic particle have more mass that the particle it makes?am i missing something?

 

shouldn't be that's the logical way of thinking it?that in the hierarchy of particles, the fundamental ones have higher energies?

I think the confusion here is in belovelife's original question. The Higgs boson is not a constituent part of the proton. The Higgs boson is a force carrier of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is what gives particles mass in the Standard Model. CraigD has already linked to the relevant wikipedia articles, and to be honest, all of this is so far over my head that I can't really intelligently comment. Even my go-to source for plain language explanations, the Starts With a Bang blog, is barely adequate to the task. Perhaps you'll find Ethan Siegel's analogy of particles as sponges and the Higgs field as water that particles move through more satisfying than I did.

How the Higgs gives Mass to the Universe

 

Of note, he also claims that this is pretty much the death knell for alternatives to the standard model like string theory and supersymmetry. From his post the day before the sigma 5 announcement from CERN, The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs

If this is' date=' in fact, where the Higgs appears to be, and the rates observed are consistent with the standard model predictions, and there are no other “new particle” announcements that come out on the 4th, then this is an amazing victory for the standard model.

 

And a nightmare scenario for everything else, including supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory.

 

Because finding the standard model Higgs at this energy means that there’s no need for any of those things. A Higgs at 125 GeV and nothing else at the LHC, totally consistent with the standard model, mean that if supersymmetry exists, it needs to be at such a high energy that it no longer solves the problem it was designed to solve! Despite the absurd claims that others have made, this incredible standard model victory could finally start hammering nails into the coffin of low-energy supersymmetry, which was the prime experimental motivator for string theory in the first place.[/quote']

[CraigD]

As this Higgs mechanism stuff is beyond all but my most vague understanding, please assume a big IMHO qualifier in everything I write. That said, answers to your question, watcher:

1. then why do we need much more energy in our particle collider to break down the higg's boson.

The record-setting energies given to the protons collided in the LHC to produce the expected and detected “Higgs signature” isn’t needed to “break down” Higgs bosons, but creates them. Higgs bosons are very unstable, so only stay created for a brief duration (I’ve found no more precise description of how brief than phrases like “almost immediately after its creation”). What the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS detectors are actually detecting are the stable (or at least more stable) particles emitted when the Higgs boson decays.

 

In other words, this experiment is not analogous to splitting uranium nuclei by bombarding them neutrons to demonstrate nuclear fission, but to pumping californium nuclei with calcium nuclei to create ununoctium.

 

To be precise, what’s theorized to be occurring these experiments is this:

1. 2 protons get very close together (this is what a super-powerful collider like the LHC is needed for)

2a. A pair of gluons in the protons each spontaneously split into top quark/anti-top quark pairs

OR

2b. A pair of the up or down quarks in the protons emit W or Z bosons

3. The products from 2a or 2b combine to form a Higgs boson

4a. The Higgs boson decays into a pair of photons

4b1. The Higgs boson decays into a pair of Z bosons

4b2a. Each Z boson decays into an electron and an anti-electron (AKA a positron)

4b2b. Each Z boson decays into an muon and an anti-muon (not stable, but with average lifetimes of about 0.000002 seconds, stable enough to reach the detectors before decaying)

 

The LHC’s detectors are detecting these end products.

 

isn't the rule, the more fundamental a particle, the harder to crack it?

In the usual meaning of the term elementary (which is conventionally preferred to, but about synonymous to fundamental), the rule is you can’t crack a fundamental particle. If a particle can be broken into smaller, constituent particles, it’s not fundamental.

 

This gets a bit confusing, as in quantum mechanics, elementary particle can and commonly do transform into other particles

 

2. in string theory, strings as fundamental constituents of matter is packed with enormous energy.

What “strings are packed with energy” means is way over my head.

 

But, from JMJones’s quotes of astrophysicist Ethan Seigel, I get the impression that string theories (while arguably not having made any theoretical predictions that make it possible for them as a class to be disproven), appear much less promising as a result of the Higgs discovery.

 

It may be fair to say this was the death knell of string theory.

 

3. in Lorentz transformation. .. the sign that a particle is energetic is it vibrates very fast and the wavelengths shrinks. so naturally a fundamental particle must have a very high frequency and very short wavelength.

I think you’re confusing mass dilation (

[math]m = \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\left( \frac{v}{c}\right)^2}}[/math]

) with de Broglie waves, Watcher.

 

The energy of a particle, elementary or composite, small or large, is given both by its mass [imath]m[/imath], by

[math]E= mc^2[/math]

, and by its frequency [imath]v[/imath], when it is considered to be a wave rather than a particle, by

[math]E = hv[/math]

 

The de Broglie frequency [imath]v[/imath] shouldn’t be interpreted as a “vibration”. I think people have a tendency to do this because we use the same units (time^-1, in the SI system, the hertz) for it as we do from pressure waves in solids, which are vibrations. A body having an associated de Broglie wave doesn’t, however, mean its vibrating.

 

While any increase in a body’s speed relative to an observer results in mass dilation, the speed of vibrating parts is usually a very small compared to the speed of light, so doesn’t result in much mass dilation. Particle accelerators like the LHC, for example, don’t increase the effective mass of the protons they accelerate by vibrating them, but by accelerating them in straight or gently curving paths.

 

Low-mass particles, such as the electron, a fundamental particle, have longer de Broglie wavelengths and lower frequencies than more massive ones that are not fundamental, NOT shorter and higher ones. This is the reason wave-like phenomena such as interference patterns can be observed in stream of electrons, but not streams of, say, cannon balls: in the case of the latter, the be Broglie wavelength is much shorter than the size of the body, so the mark they make on any recording medium is much larger than the interference pattern they would make.