[HN Gopher] What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe
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What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-02-22 06:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.symmetrymagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.symmetrymagazine.org)
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Interesting article, I think I actually understand a lot more
| than I usually do with physics articles. This quote stood out
| though. I lol'd:
|
| "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".
| kytazo wrote:
| As well as punching holes in the time space continuum
| dilivion wrote:
| The discovery of the Higss boson and nothing else outside the
| Standard Model at the LHC is the worst-case scenario: we now have
| a theory of everything that predicts nothing...
| lucozade wrote:
| I think you have it exactly backwards. The standard model is
| astonishingly good at predictions. It's just not a theory of
| everything. And the output from LHC has discounted some
| approaches to a TofE but hasn't helped to point the way to a
| strong candidate.
| evanb wrote:
| "That predicts nothing" is very far from the truth! It predicts
| almost everything we have ever observed experimentally!
| ninkendo wrote:
| It predicts things we've already observed, sure. But we came
| up with the standard model _after_ seeing what ideas worked
| and which ones didn't, and we get to amend it every time an
| experiment shows us something new.
|
| 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.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Well it predicted several things like the Higgs Boson, the
| top quark, Electroweak Unification, neutrinos...
| btilly wrote:
| Neutrinos were predicted and discovered long before the
| standard model.
|
| 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.
| evanb wrote:
| It predicts much more than what has been put in. The SM has
| 22 free parameters. I agree that if it predicted exactly 22
| data points it'd be a pointless encoding of what was put
| in. But it predicts thousands and thousands of data points,
| some to twelve decimal points.
|
| 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.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| quchen wrote:
| ... and later throwing more and more darts and still
| hitting the center.
| morbia wrote:
| The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To
| name but a few problems:
|
| * 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.
| evanb wrote:
| "Highly parameterized" meaning O(20) free parameters. It
| matches thousands upon thousands of detailed precision data
| points.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Pedantically, that's not how O notation works.
|
| 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.
| morbia wrote:
| There is a philosophical discussion to be had about whether
| 19 physical parameters is "a lot", and another discussion
| about fine tuning. However, I was primarily referring to
| the artifical parameters that arise from doing real
| calculations (renormalisation scale, mass factorisation
| scale, PDFs etc). These plague pretty much all perturbative
| QCD calculations, and then particle physicists play games
| like varying them by a factor of 1/2 and 2 to get something
| that looks like error bars...
| evanb wrote:
| The number of SM parameters is not a lot, given the reach
| of the model, which is literally every physical
| phenomenon ever observed on Earth with enough detail, but
| gravity. Thousands of independent experiments, and
| observational data on a scale so absurdly large it's hard
| to state plainly. Any philosopher who wants to claim
| nineteen parameters is large is out of their minds!
|
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To
| name but a few problems...
|
| 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)
|
| https://youtu.be/pLbSlC0Pucw
| Donckele wrote:
| Ooof! Spoiler alert!
| hyperman1 wrote:
| The standard model is basically a list of correctly working
| theories, taped together like the monster of Frankenstein.
|
| 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
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This a a pretty reaching take. The standard model has lots of
| short comings and definitely doesn't survive everything we
| throw at it, namely gravity and likewise general relativity.
| thriftwy wrote:
| If vacuum is meta-stable it is possible for entirely
| different set of fields to exist instead, but the gravity
| would be the same, I guess. This makes it outside of
| standard model.
| 1-6 wrote:
| It's a good topic to ponder the existence of intelligent design.
| ianai wrote:
| I'd suggest anyone with a passing knowledge of calculus, complex
| numbers, and vectors to sit through Leonard Suskind's lectures on
| quantum gravity. This one was good and wouldn't need the
| calc/math background, I think:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OkwGDKoY0o . But YT is full of
| actual physics lectures and sitting in on them is pretty
| approachable with that calc/math background. I think they give an
| interesting comparison to these popular pieces on particle
| physics. You might not understand everything the way a physics
| college student should, and that's ok because you aren't one. But
| I bet you walk away knowing quite a bit more than you suspect and
| you can always replay them.
|
| 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.)
| dools wrote:
| I watched every single one of the 163 lectures in that series.
| They're all amazing, and surprisingly addictive.
|
| As one YouTube commenter put it so aptly, I always looked
| forward to "snack time with Lenny".
| abecedarius wrote:
| Where is this series? The youtube link above seems to be to a
| standalone lecture. Trying the search terms from this
| discussion found two other standalone lectures. Is there some
| UI element on youtube that I'm missing that should make this
| obvious?
| dools wrote:
| Here you go, also it's 136 not 163 :)
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6i60qoDQhQGaGbbg-4aSwXJ
| v...
| danbruc wrote:
| The Theoretical Minimum [1]
|
| [1] https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
| abecedarius wrote:
| Thank you!
| hansvm wrote:
| Searching for "leonard susskind lectures" returns a
| playlist as the first result for me (desktop web). There's
| also a UI element at the top to filter results to just
| playlists.
| abecedarius wrote:
| The comment starting this thread referenced it as "his
| lectures on quantum gravity".
|
| Thanks for pointing out the youtube playlist-only search
| option -- that should be handy.
| dustingetz wrote:
| How do y'all organize your youtube queue, is there third party
| software? Looking to streamline this to make it "netflix easy"
| as I am inevitably feeling tired when allocating leisure time
| to this. I have a couch laptop, chromecast and iphone
| ajari_ wrote:
| It is not as simple as Netflix but my strategy is to add
| interesting videos into the "watch later" playlist. Then,
| during leisure time I do a quick scan and pick something.
|
| If I find myself watching a lot of the same genre I create a
| "watch later" for that subject.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Susskind really is the man.
|
| 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).
| parton wrote:
| These are what originally got me into physics. For physics
| enthusiasts who have exhausted most pop physics content but
| aren't looking to get a full degree, there isn't much better
| than Susskind's lectures.
| andreareina wrote:
| Also a good series bot focusing more on the higher level (but
| without dissolving into woo) is Sean Carroll's Biggest Ideas in
| the Universe series
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyj...
| legrande wrote:
| > Pop-sci pieces tend to portray the universe as just a bunch
| of particles interacting in odd/spooky ways
|
| 'Spooky action at a distance'[0]
|
| [0] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2015/11/nist-team-
| prov...
| nyc111 wrote:
| Were there any other observations of this particle after its
| discovery, do you know? Is it rare, or is it commonplace?
| danbruc wrote:
| I quick search suggests [1] that the LHC is producing millions
| of them and the detectors are able to observe thousands of
| those.
|
| [1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-Higgs-bosons-have-been-
| observ...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Is it rare, or is it commonplace?
|
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| I always have trouble imagining the fields. Are they like
| Photoshop layers that work in the background?
| danbruc wrote:
| Those fields are a mathematical tool to describe what is
| going on in a specific way - for example making the local
| character of particle interactions obvious - but there is
| no evidence that there are actually any fields. Quite the
| opposite, a good reason to doubt that those fields are real
| is that they have Gauge redundancies, i.e. one physical
| state has several different mathematical representations.
| prox wrote:
| So basically a certain energy allows to bring forth
| certain particles into being through laws of physics. How
| does the universe know the laws, how is it encoded? Sorry
| if I am vague!
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's complicated...
|
| 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 :(.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| (replying to self - sorry)
|
| > 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).
| parton wrote:
| This is a good summary. Only thing to add is that the Higgs
| particles are basically oscillations on top of the background
| value of the Higgs field, just like photons are oscillations
| of an EM field. In both cases, the field is the more
| fundamental object, so your question at the end is backwards
| :)
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