How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 พ.ค. 2024
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Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure particle’s mass seems to be heavier than expected. So why do we care? Because understanding why this particle even has mass was one of the most important breakthroughs in our understanding of the subatomic world. And because measuring its precise mass either doubles down on our current understanding or reveals a path to an even deeper knowledge. The FermiLab discrepancy is a tantalizing hint of the latter.
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If you really want to know about the W boson mass measurement at FermiLab, your favorite W-boson-mass-hunter, Don Lincoln, has you covered. th-cam.com/video/wRhAZ9M-lI8/w-d-xo.html
I, too, like Don Lincoln and it is well worth subscribing to the Fermilab youTube channel th-cam.com/channels/D5B6VoXv41fJ-IW8Wrhz9A.html . It has great content.
thanks mr time spacema
What would happen if there wasnt just one single mass for a W boson, and it could vary in mass. Just a throw-out-there idea.
Fermilab channel is awesome, so it is this one.
The title should be 'How the Higgs Mechanism gives'.
I feel like this channel started out late high-school level and has slowly pushed us into late college level stuff. As some one who’s been here from the start its great and I feel like I have received a valuable education minus the deep math
They're simplifying early grad school stuff in this video
Schools never have data this new. This is fresh 2022 stuff straight out of the oven.
@@Redfizh the fermilab measurement is new, but the meat of this episode, the mathematical origin for mass in these particles is something that has been around for a while. Higgs came up with his prediction of the Higgs boson decades ago, before we had the equipment to confirm it actually existed.
These concepts are taught at university level.
Math whether it’s shallow or deep is not related to Science which is primarily a tool or method which was discovered by Eratosthenes over 2,000 years ago.
Mathematics is field of inquiry that belongs in the Arts Faculty like logical Philosophy, finger painting, sculpture, dance and acting.
In fact, mathematics is one of the purest forms of Art.
Music and marketing are closer to Science than what mathematics is.
This is not to say that Art doesnt talk to Science - it does! Everything we do and think of is interrelated in some way - often in subtle or obscure ways.
We need to be careful when coupling the claims, theorems and discoveries made in one field or discipline with those made in another field.
@@PetraKann beautifully written, are you an acedemic?
I love being talked through the hieroglyphics.
why can't photons count as negative mass
easier than the chinese characters, let me tell you that!
@@osmosisjones4912 because photons have no mass
@@osmosisjones4912 Why would they?
@@TheoEvian 永遠不會放棄你
This show is one of the best things I’ve ever come across. Thank you PBS, Matt, Editors, Effects, Audio, and all the nameless folks who bring this freely to us all. What a time to be alive.
This was such a great explanation beyond the classic "the particles bump into the higgs field slowing them down" explanation.
That’s one of the most challenging recent videos. Wish I could say I learnt something, but it doesn’t click yet.
Some learning and re-watching to do first!
Don’t dumb it down, it’s entertaining to be pushed to learn.
I agree completely
I'll be listening intently, and then realized I phased out for 2 seconds and need to rewatch a few minutes, lol.
I think I’m going to need to watch previous episodes mentioned in the video to understand this one
I hate to break it to you, but I guarantee you this *is* being dumbed down. A lot. There's a reason this stuff is an entire scientific field of its own. (Yes, I also went back and watched all the referenced videos and no, I still don't understand like 60% of it lol)
@@anexesstormlord7193 sure it is, but I think there’s still a lot of room for further dumbing down. I appreciate the current level of accessibility.
Matt: Don't worry. It's not on the test.
Some physics teacher somewhere: Oh, but it is!
the higs field sounds like negative mass
@@osmosisjones4912 Get out of my Lagrangian you negative mass, or I'll use imaginary velocity to defeat you.
@@osmosisjones4912 If you stick the higgs field to energy then it doesnt become more heavy
Then the music at 17:48 plays 💀
This was excellent. The 3-D mapping of the "Mexican Hat" really helped me understand how a symmetrical field can still have random elements. That "ahh, now I get it!" moment.
I normally understand your episodes, but most of this one went over my head. I'm sure that just reflects what a complex topic it is. Thanks as always for putting out amazing content! Even though I didn't understand a lot of it, I'm glad to know that these exciting developments are happening!
at first quantum mechanics was super complex also, it just took a looong time before we learned how to explain it, and this topic is relatively fresh
We've been looking into the details of really small things, and we've been figuring out more and more of it. Some things make sense, and parts of the theory predict each other. Kind of like if you hear a mooing sound, then you can look and you'll find a cow. Likewise if you see a cow, you'll probably hear it moo. They predict each other.
It seems like most of the universe should be like this, and largely, this is what we find. They give the example of a bowl with a ball that can roll up and down any of the sides in the bowl, and it's always symmetrical. You see the ball roll up one side and it should roll down the other. But if there's a bump in the center? Then the ball can't roll evenly from one side to the other. It picks a random direction from the top of the center bump and gets stuck down that side. It's no longer symmetrical. There are moos with no cows and cows with no moos. When you do the math, that part matches the bit where the particle's mass should come from.
I really like Matt as a presenter. His grasp of the material here is impressive. To hear him able to lay it all out in what sounds like such a clear and logical progression and all the while I'm near totally lost. It's a beautiful thing to listen to, but really, in the case of this episode, it's more like I'm just dazzled by an awesome display of the aurora borealis. I can't touch it and I just can't stop watching, or in this case listening. Bits of it do make sense, nevertheless, in the end it's all quite satisfying to hear it all come down to another fascinating aspect of... Space-Time.
Ditto, over my head!
Is it hard to say that it's just explained a bit unclear? It's hard to follow if you have limited understanding of the topics, because he moves from concept to concept before you have time to get your bearings. There are other youtubers who make it easier to understand.
It's also worded a bit colorfully on purpose. I suppose that's what most people here are after, it's like a form of poetry.
This topic isn’t easy. I have an MS in applied physics, for perspective. Some things are just hard. I don’t get a lot of it either.
This is probably one of your more difficult episodes to grasp for non-physics majors, yet also one of your most fascinating, it will be exciting to see whether the Fermilab result holds up to scrutiny!
the higs field sounds like negative mass
I am an electrical engineer, fimiliar with the math and most terms and I find this incredibly hard to understand.
Don't know about that, I'm not a non-physics major - whatever that is (musician & linguist) - but I sort of got this.
@@paulbennett7021 well im also not a physics major and *extremely* confused, you have to understand that not everyone is you.
I think Fermilab data are the scrutiny. Also: this is difficult for physics majors, too.
I can usually follow along and understand each episode, but this one went way over my head. Guess I need to refresh my memory with a few more episodes...
Of SpaceTime.
I'm glad I"m not the only one. I kept having to skip back because I was getting totally lost, usually I'm able to follow without a problem haha. Not a criticism, mind!
I want to understand, but sadly I do not. Most certainly NOT our host's fault.
It comes down to how particles interact with the substrate and each other. And how different patches of space interact with each other. As things at the smallest scales seem to be quantum and come in discreet slices. The math is just measurements. What we can observe.
@@marcosolo6491 I really want to dive into the math on this. Are there any books you can recommend?
Yeah, this builds upon a lot of difficult concepts that hey have explained earlier like symmetries and transformations
I'm not supposed to be in this class...
😂😂
I'm brasilian and I'm learning English. This channel is very good 👍🏾
Finally an explanation of the higgs mechanism that answers a lot of my "ok, but where did it come from?" questions! I love this episode.
Quite mesmerizing
The amount of self confidence to say mass just "math'd out into existence" is why physics are for wizards.
@@brago.gameplays Hippity
Hoppity
There goes gravity
Mom's Spaghetti
@Daniel E. 556⁵⁵⁴
Heh explaination please? The thumbnail said "Explaination... of Mechanism" not a more detailed possible "description".
There's something akin to cosmic horror in this, but it's also beautiful
It's quite literally existential so that makes total sense.
Yeah thinking that we only exist thanks to some weird quirks in the universe symettries that cause things to have mass is kinda spooky
Someone recently described cosmic horror/madness like this: Imagine you're an ant walking along a computer board. The landscape is made of a strange material and various things are humming around you. Suddenly, you understand what it all means. It's using lightning to do math (whatever that is). It's communicating with others like it in places so far away you can barely comprehend. Giant alien beings are playing "games" another concept you don't even have a word for. And then just as suddenly you're an ant again, desperately trying to keep this knowledge in your head and experience it again.
So yeah, this is cosmic horror/madness. Getting glimpses of the true nature of things we're not made to understand.
15:37 theres also something about the way he describes the weak bosons
@@Xeridanus Or maybe not an Ant but a Moth. Then the world opens up and *He comes* to remove the 'bug' in his machine.
As someone who is just about to graduate with a BS in Physics, I'm glad that I'm now at least able to follow along with 90% of what's going on in this video. To be fair, I am not a particle physicist and am focused more on astrophysics, but I can still at least figure out what's going on.
My physics degree was over 20 years ago. I struggle to remember if they taught me some of the stuff I watched but just forgotten it or if I didn’t learn it at all. Nonetheless given what I do now has nothing to do with physics, my passion of it has only mildly diminished.
Take a grad level QM course, plus QFT using Peskin & Schroeder. Otherwise, we'll have only a qualitative feel for the video, based on our understanding of undergraduate QM
I am shocked at how much this sparked my memory from my modern physics and quantum mechanics courses from 12 years ago...thought I had lost most of that math and information.
You don't lose it, it just sits there taking up neurons, occasionally laughing at your university fee debts. Bless it.
I come here for the heavy puns.
So far i'm massively impressed.
That's a good topic because we can all weigh in on it
I prefer to keep things light.
Some of us are just too dense to pick up on the good jokes.
I come here for iq dose.
Biology and chemistry are dumb
It's episodes like this that make me wanna go rewatch the 10 or so episodes before. I find it's like a new layer of understanding being revealed every rewatch. Goes to show how info dense these things really are!
I’ve been thinking of starting from the beginning now that I understand more.
I just rewatched all the videos in the playlist in the description before rewatching this one and it helped me understand this video much better.
I think you just blew my brain. I completely concur with everyone else - this channel started out with A/S to A Level Physics and we’re now well into University level. That’s to be expected (and excellent). Amazing work… but I somehow feel like I skipped some chapters in the textbook somewhere! Is this just a clever trick to get me to rewatch all the past videos for a sixth and seventh time?!
I second the motion!
I responded to the episode idea survey about a week ago and requested that the higgs mechanism explained episode be revisited and here it is! Thank you PBS Space Time! Thoroughly enjoyed it! :D
Yeah, the 'further explication' eps are always welcome. But each episode takes weeks to produce, plan, shoot & edit before they get to our screens. They don't just knock one out within a few days of a viewer suggestion.
...but good suggestion anyway!😀
@@simesaid I was simply stating that I wrote the same topic as a response in the previous weeks survey. I did not say that they used my suggestion and created this video because of it lol. It was exciting to see the topic come up after I had been wanting it revisited.
Me: ok time to sleep
SpaceTime: Why does the W Boson’s mass matter?
Me: 🤔
me too, started the vid with only 4 hrs of sleep left till work
As as non-physics major, I really like seeing these episodes which explain the formula and then show how it gets converted to some kind of real world representation. It's a gap I often have a hard time bridging in my head.
I’m studying these at university right now and I gotta say you did a great job summarizing the most important concepts. Explaining symmetries is quite challenging, and those animations really help to better grasp the ideas involved.
I completed the survey before this episode came out... and this episode was almost exactly what I asked for in my survey responses. I loved the deeper mathematics here... and I'm going to have to watch the episode at least once more to completely absorb the equations. Thank you!
You've just gotta tap that notification banner when it says "PBS Spacetime"
I feel this personally
I disagree. I can't just dive into these whenever. I gotta set the *mood*
The last "Space Time" is one of the few things that dispel my monotony and enable me to do anything! Thank you Matt for everything!!!! ❤ from Bangladesh!!!
Namaste and L'chaim from Jerusalem. Salem.
"So far... so bad. But let's forge on anyway and hope it all gets sorted out"
Every physicist in history ever.
This was one of the more fascinating and rewarding videos to follow. Our universe’s mechanisms are beautiful even without being able to see the whole picture yet.
Can't get enough of this channel !! Super educational and helps me to feel like I know something now.
me too, except I really have no idea what I know now...
the higs field sounds like negative mass
can photos work as negative mass
Y'all ever take a crap so big that when you go to sit down the next day, some of it squirt out onto your legs & back?
I love this channel but some of the stuff is way out my wheelhouse but thats one reason I'm here I guess
Wow more of these videos that go into the math, please! I have to stop multiple times to cross-reference text books but wow these overviews with a bit in depth explanations are awesome.
There are tons of videos where they explain the actual equations, in fact i think this is the only physics channel that does so
Watching this feels like the crossover scene in avengers endgame where all these different characters and pieces fiinly come together
Matt, please, mercy. This video melted my brain.
😂
What I appreciate the most is the feeling of "lossless compression of information"
Often helpful metaphors are used to explain science, but there is a nagging feeling that crucial details were glossed over.
I propose a new class of particles called bozoffs, which carry anti-forces.
I'm picturing Mr. Miyagi teaching physics.
Honestly bozoff is 100x better than the names of all of the super symmetric particles. You're unironically much better at coming up with names than any actual particle physicists.
The world is full of bozos
The union of physics theories is broken by bezos.
bozos
G'day Mr O'Dowd from Perth, WA.
R.I.P Peter Higgs.
Very informative video and extremely enjoyable to watch. I'm very happy I found your channel.
The last time I was this early, electroweak symmetry hadn't broken yet
It still blows my mind that this is how the universe works at the quantum scale. Yet it seems so natural with the aforementioned symmetries
It's *kind of* how the universe works.
We know all our current theories have flaws, and in the worst case scenario they might all just be approximations that just happen to work really well.
But the relationship between forces and symmetries is certainly a great discovery and a big step towards the truth.
@@viliml2763 That is it true, but I believe the Standard Model is close to the "true" theory of everything similar to how Newtonian Gravity is General Relativity when moving slow.
Is usually struggled understanding most of your vids especially the ones about the fields , particles etc. however this one gelled with me and increased my knowledge greatly , thanks for this awesome content
rip Mr Peter Higgs, thanks for everything
Watching this channel and learning about the things that scientists are ACTUALLY doing and learning, has been the ONLY thing that has given me hope for the future of man kind. The very opposite of what watching main stream news channels do.
this is one of those episodes that you can't watch at 2x or 1x for that matter... head.. it hurtzzz
This channel is a true treasure, thank you for your dedication
We really need some new videos on QCD! You are by far one of the most thorough, digestible YT channels for this quantum mechanics content; your recent videos now have me interested in why fermions have mass and how the strong force symmetries come into play; I cannot find any other good videos on the topic.
The middle made my head spin, but the end brought it together in a way that actually gave me an approximate (if simple) understanding!
7:50 - When he said "don't worry, this won't be on the test." It just reminded me that he's got a PHD and is also a professor, so for a few people out there, this genuinely was on the test. Poor bastards, should have been smart and jumped ship to biology while you had the chance. Real talk, the math was delightful. Watching Spacetme has, oddly, greatly helped improve my knowledge of math more than anything else.
Edit: 11:00 - Just realised Leonard Susskind did a popular lecture on this 15 years ago that's floating around on TH-cam. I'd watched it but never really got it, this helped a lot. Link to the Susskind lecture: th-cam.com/video/JqNg819PiZY/w-d-xo.html
Edit: 16:45 - I've always believed that you're either born a scientist, or shaped into one. I was definitely born into it. I've always counted myself lucky to have been part of this... thing, to get to understand at least some of the beauty, if not all of it. Statistically speaking, a little African kid shouldn't. Much Love from Zimbabwe. I think this was your episode so far.
Biochem is my arch nemesis. I went civil engineering and then had a good dose of math, for the first time, in master's structural. My passion for physics, that Spacetime has helped to foster and expand, has been growing for a long time, but this is the first episode of any program, ever, to give an intuitive understanding of the what it means to have a symmetry break, and the math bears that out. This is astounding, and it makes me want to go get a physics degree even more.
@@kindlin Clearly, we should have all just done pure physics, lol. I feel you on the symmetry breaking, this is the best explanation I've heard of it.
Planck Yeah!
This is a fantastic channel truly refreshing and something different. Thank You!
Thanks for making these videos with great visuals and explanations. They make it enjoyable when I’m watching them for the 20th time, like this one, to understand them. This one is a lot to take in but really a desired subject. Thanks for making it digestible for us out here. Please keep doing your amazing work.
Thank you for this, I’ve been hoping you would cover the details of this news since I heard about it. Pleasantly surprised that you were able to cover it so soon!
One of the important things in science is that where experiments can be used (you cannot repeat the exact same earthquake, or a nova), those experiments should be reproducible. The multitude of W-boson mass measurements made so far tend to lie (as in not-sitting or standing) quite some distance apart, the latest disagreeing the most. I'd love to see some more W-boson mass measurements and other measurements of bosons. And explanations for why some of the other experiments had produced their lower values. Taking measurements is hard and there's lot to learn about that, perhaps even more than there is to learn about W's mass.
i don't work in experimental high energy, but knowing that scientists primarily pushes for originality, wonder just how much effort is expended in reproducing other results? does CERN allocate some timeslots per year just to confirm the finding of others?
You've just given me EXACTLY the video I asked for in the fan survey. That is the very best service possible, thank you!
It would be nice to have an episode discussing the Higgs coupling to the Fermion fields for a hopefully simpler example. Also, that Chi-cubed term looks like an anti-Hermetian term, which is usually bad when you are talking about potentials.There is one that pops up in the Dirac equation, but it is resolved if you expand the electron field by expressing the positron field as a relativistic expansion of the electron field. Is something similar going on in this case?
I really do love listening to Spacetime. Mat does a fantastic job of explaining such complicated ideas to us non-experts.
Shout out the late, great Steven Weinberg who surely deserves to be remembered by name for much of this episode.
I love this show, thanks Matt at PBS! Its like a strangely therapeutic escape from the drama and turmoil of news and world events.
IKR! The spacelike backgrounds, the gentle synth music, and Matt's supernaturally calm and wryly amusing presentation style really hit the spot for me too. (Not just world events, but life events, in my case.)
I swear I'm addicted to this channel, I've discover it a few weeks ago and since then I've watched dozens of videos, the quality is awesome and the script of the videos too, I'm not fluent in English yet so the subtitles help me a lot, sometimes I have to search a word he said but this is great cuz I'm learning new words while watching educacional videos, so thank you for feeding the curiosity of this curious being(If I have made a gramatical error in this comment pls tell me💀).
I know this is eight months later, but I would have thought you were a native speaker of English if you hadn’t mentioned you were not fluent. If all your written English is like this then I would say you are fluent, or at least incredibly close.
For context, I’m very adept at English even among native speakers. I read constantly online, and a lot of older generation Americans who speak English natively don’t come close to your level of quality in this comment.
Looking forward to a compilation of this channel's content in book form. There's so many videos at this point, with deep interrelations, that I feel like a Space Time encyclopedia makes sense.
How come Matt looks like a character from The Long Dark? I appreciate this another take on explaining Higgs Matt. You're the best!
Atheist-TH-camrs, Conspiracy-Debunkers and Science-Channel
are basically blood-related;
to the point where they even overlap in what they cover... all the time.
So many cover Problems with Religion, even if we exclude Cult-Experts like Telltale
from said Family of Channel.
I think I can safely say this is the most complicated episode you've done to date. I have a physics degree but I didn't take that many QM courses and I found it hard to keep up at times. I can't imagine what ordinary people must see
To quote Socrates, All I know is that I know nothing.
Personally, (as a math teacher) I liked the video a lot, and I am somewhat interested to hear about the proof/details. Although honestly, PBS Spacetime has earned my trust to the degree that I'm only really interested in the nitty-gritty to better conceptualize the *conclusions* about what it shows us about our current understanding of the universe and the direction of where it's pointing to look next.
In other words, I'm mostly interested in @15:07 but I need to watch the whole video to better visualize what I means, even if don't fully understand the maths along the way.
I only took physics to highschool level so there are parts of this that fly over my head, but with a little effort I can keep up with the gist of it and for brief moments have a clear understanding.
I expected something light to just listen to while I was stressed. Definitely gonna come back to this video when my head is clear and I can pay attention because this looks like it's answering my questions about the Higgs field and stuff!
Atheist-TH-camrs, Conspiracy-Debunkers and Science-Channel
are basically blood-related;
to the point where they even overlap in what they cover... all the time.
So many cover Problems with Religion, even if we exclude Cult-Experts like Telltale
from said Family of Channel.
As a long-ago physics major (who ended up in an entirely different field) I really appreciate your going into real mathematical detail instead of the usual analogies and hand waving in typical popularizations. Particularly the idea that because the coupling term in the Lagrangian has the same mathematical form as would a term in the Lagrangian that signifies mass, the dynamics that result are indistinguishable from it actually being mass.
It was nice to see that old friend the Langrangian again after so many years. I remember how beautiful and audacious I thought it was when i first was introduced to it. Somebody (Joseph-Loius Lagrange) just sits down and solves ALL mechanics problems in a general way once and for all!
@@FredPlanatia Yes, one of the three really elegant nineteenth (?) century formulations, along with Hamilton's equations and Poisson brackets!
This is going on the "rewatch a few times" list :D But it's fun to puzzle through the challenging stuff sometimes. Doing so with the General Relativity playlist is what got me into this channel.
Hello there👋how are you doing today? Hope you stay blessed as you’re already.God bless you🥰
absolutely mind blowing stuff. incredible how far we've come in our understanding in just the last century
Loved how you went into the math a bit here, please do more of this!
Silly question,: If there are a ring of valid vacuum states available, and the universe has settled upon one of the many, then is there any reason for the "interior" of a black hole to also settle into the same state, or could a black hole potentially contain another one of the many possible options? Likewise, as the curvature becomes increasingly more extreme around and inside the event horizon, is it possible for several vacuum states to exist in discrete boundaries further and further within the black hole without conflict? If so, would this lead to varied values for the Higgs boson within each level, leading to nested shells of increasing (or decreasing) vacuum states? If so, what consequence would this have for the "mass" of the entire system? Presumably, the confined surface (volume) of a black hole would not only permit different values to the infinite and flat external spacetime of the observable universe, right? Feels like I'm definitely missing something here... probably means that I need to rewatch the entire series again, eh?
What I thought you were going to say: “If there are a ring of valid vacuum states available, and the universe has settled upon one of the many, then is there truly one ring to rule them all?”
The inside of a black hole is a region of spacetime which has indefinitely delayed transmitting any information to the rest of the universe, except through "gravity" or deforming spacetime itself. Speculations about the nature of that interior can never be proven nor disproven, and so are unscientific.
This largely depends on what the interior of a black hole IS, which is currently only theoretical. For example, if matter compresses and increases in temperature during collapse it's possible for the space within to reach a higher energy state. Possibly all of a black hole's mass\energy is stored in a sphere of high energy vacuum. Other theories invoke wormholes or loop quantum gravity. So the answer to your question is a definite maybe, we have yet to find the theory or experiment that will answer it for us.
Yesss new Spacetime! Now... let's see if I understand any of it.
Edit: watched twice now, and some of it kinda makes sense? Which is mostly a testament to Matt's ability to explain high level topics to the hobbyist or layperson.
same lol
Good luck!
Almost fainted from laughter when you said "This is a simplified explanation." Not that I doubt that, oh no. I don't watch these excellent videos with any hope of understanding, I watch to marvel that anyone understands & that the Universe is so intricate. Yet every so often, I wonder if the Universe is just having you-all on? Thank you for letting me peek behind the curtain of understanding.
Thanks for keeping the level of discourse up. I could take the math for granted, as I’ve done in the past, but following this channel has helped me understand more of it. I’ll be watching this a few times and figuring along.
Awesome episode. I really appreciate the non-dummed down math!
Pity about the spelling though.
@@MrDino1953 🤣
@@MrDino1953 Spelling = dumbed over, math = not dumbed down.
a new PBS video, direct auto like :)
You are the reason physics is dying
Thanks for educating us.
Thank you for engaging us with this level of complexity. Too often will physicists give up on us.
If the universe has a mexican hat potential, does that mean that salsa is the stable vacuum state on the chip of the higgs field?
Glorious comment
This video made me realize that somewhere along the way I completely stopped understanding what we're talking about here. I need to go back and rewatch the old stuff so I can get a hang on things.
PBS is a national treasure! I love PBS Space Time and all of the free knowledge!!!
i like how when there's something we can't really understand the cause of, it's probably another particle we don't know yet. And to be fair, it probably is. Always new stuff to discover. I wonder if the particles are real or just a manifestation of some powers we can't yet grasp..So many question, it's fascinating
The latter I think
it took me an hour using google to understand everything i just watched. Worth it
I don't really understand the maths in all this, but I can listen to this guy anytime any day anytime when am free...
Nowadays we often hear particle theorists discussing the beauty of the Higgs mechanism, often invoking it to show how elegance and beauty are good guides to understanding nature. Yet, when Peter Higgs was asked about his early interaction with colleagues, he pointed out that Heisenberg criticized him, saying that the mechanism for giving mass to particles showed that Peter Higgs did not understand physics.
Sounds true to form. Wasn't heisenberg that doubt-inducing headmaster guy? The uncertainty principal?
It’s always exciting when your peers get something wrong, can’t wait to see what happens next
This is by far the best explanation I have ever heard. I love you.
Thanks Matt and team for taking this on. Courage!
Better question is what gives the Higgs particle mass that other particles don't have.
from what i understood -- its the interaction or anchoring that makes "mass". its not something Higgs has and chooses to hand out. something that Matt said as well is that there are probably other "mass granting particles" that can account for the extra mass the bosons have that Fermilabs found.
What I never understood:
If all those particles we see come from a broken symetry like with the analogy of the iron gaining/loosing magnetism at a certain temperature. What is the actual difference between all particles/forces? Or to stay in this analogy: wouldn't all particles have the same temperature?
Why isn't everything the same but some have properties and others not? A block of iron would cool down equally, too.
Temperature is not a property of a particle. Temperature is the average oscillation of all particles. Therefore, in a context of a single particle, temperature is meaningless, and your question: "wouldn't all particles have the same temperature?" doesn't make sense. It's like asking: "wouldn't all the particles have the same average oscillation velocity?"
@@peezieforestem5078 But the question is the same. How could the same "source" come to different results? I would assume the "energy level" is the same for all particles since the universe cooled more or less equally.
I mean its not like we can find photons only in stars and protons only in space etc.
All particles DO have (sort of) the same temperature. (Stars are a bit hotter than deep space.) What we see in the universe is the properties those particles have at (essentially) absolute zero, the ground state.
Transitions like electroweak symmetry breaking occur at a certain temperature and when the universe cools past it,a ll particles are affected. When the W and Z boson were produced massive, so was the massless photon. The same transition gave us the massive electron, as well as quarks. ALL particles were affected, one way or another.
Perhaps the transition might be considered as the cooling of an alloy like AlNiCo, where the same magnetic properties apply but not all the atoms are the same. When the alloy drops below the right temperature ALL atoms are affected by the same phenomenon, even though the effect is not the same for each kind of atom.
As for WHY we have these different particles and fields in the first place, both before and after the Higgs mechanism, we do not yet know. Perhaps they are just arrangements of a single basic building block, perhaps not. We continue to seek deeper understanding there.
@@garethdean6382 Hmm, I'm not sure I understand completely.
After all the analogy with the alloy only works if the components are different. But from what I understand it is the opposite with all forces/particles.
From what I understand at very high temperatures all particles were the same. Then it cooled down and "some" became particles for transferring electro magnetic forces, others became particles for weak force etc.
To me that would only work the other way around. Like when different particles (as in the alloy) get heated and they are loosing attributes (like iron that looses its magnetism). So how can this be the other way around?
@@davidgreenwitch Well that's not quite how it works. For example, at high temperatures the electromagnetic and weak forces are the same, they merge into the electroweak force. Single and united.
BUT that force doesn't possess one single particle, it has FOUR. They seem similar, they're all massless for example, but they have different isospin and hypercharge values (++, +-, -+, --) that make them act very differently under the laws of that force.
Indeed before the symmetry breaks we have a lot more particles. Every lepton and quark (except maybe neutrinos) comes in two mirror-image types that are fused by the Higgs field in a unique fashion. Things do not become the identical, they become more symmetric. It's harder to see the symmetry between the photon and Z now, but they have always been two different things.
Even if we manage to find a GUT force or reduce things down to one particle there will need to be the same variety there, just arising from simpler building blocks in the same way all chemical elements arise from the electron, proton and neutron.
I have watched this episode five times, and it is just now starting to come together
With this episode, you touched the bleeding edge of the current state of particle physics.
My compliments for the extreme clarity of your explanations, and the discussion of the current open questions in the sector (I don't want to say "field"!).
There is no passing comment I can actually write on the matter, so I abstain - but I keep thinking.
Thank you for all your dedication;
Regards,
Anthony...
i always imagined mass to be space time "drag" created by the particle going through the higgs field...
the more "aerodynamic" the particle is the less mass it has ...kinda...
Yeah, but this analogy totally breaks when you think about inertia... If mass was drag, planets would slowdown and fall into the Sun.
@@Andrey.Balandin isn’t that what entropy is though?
@@davidsalazar13 You have to think about reletivity. If two objects are getting farther away in space, it is meaningless to ask which one is moving. From each objects perspective, the other one is moving away. If things were slowing down like this, that would give an absolute reference frame.
@@briandiehl9257 wow good point
8:47 If it's true that gauge fields shouldn't interact with themselves and shouldn't have mass, why do we consider the gluon to be mass less when it has a 3-gluon vertex, interacting with itself?
It’s possible to have a mass gauge field. I don’t think this video was trying to contest that. Maybe they used a poor choice of words.
The part where Matt said that the phi^2 term represents a self interaction was not correct. That is what the phi^4 term is supposed to be. So you can have interactions for a massless gauge field
Your correct, the gluons interactions with themselves give them mass. It’s what comprises a large portion of the mass of a hadron.
that's a really good question and i hope Matt answers it!
@@Rudol_Zeppili gluon self interactions is not what causes mass
@@FermionPhysics source?
I literally suggested an episode on the "extra" mass of the w-boson and Higgs field interactions in the survey last weekend and of course you guys were already 4 steps ahead of me LOL. Amazing as always
You and me both, coincidentally I also suggested they revisit the Higgs mechanism so they hit two birds with one stone with this one 🤣
Excellent graphics to understand your narrative… thx!
Question for Matt or others unrelated to this particular episode:
In a previous episode, a question arose regarding distant objects moving apart faster than c due to expansion of space, and whether any measurement (made from a third middleground observer, perhaps?) would distinguish that condition from one in which they were moving through space each sublight speed relative to some mid point but a net greater than c relative to each other. The answer was no, that redshift and any other measurement data would look the same for the two scenarios.
I can't sort out this apparent contradiction. Imagine there are only two objects in the universe, distantly separated, and only the void elsewhere (whatever that is). Scenario A, space is not expanding, and each is moving away from the other at greater than c locally, thus >2c cumulative. Scenario B, each object is motionless locally in a rapidly expanding space, with >2c net relative velocity with respect to each other.
General relativity prohibits one, and permits the other. Or, maybe just prohibits the crossing of the boundary necessary to reach that condition. Correct? But with only one other object and thus frame of reference in the entire universe, wouldn't relativity also suggest the two scenarios are identical?
If B is permitted and not A, then what other frame of reference is used to distinguish them? It seems that would have to be something intrinsic to the local space. Does the quantum vacuum somehow define a local frame of reference even for empty space? Is there a sort of aether after all?
If you imagine gridlines that pervade all of space, GR prohibits moving past these gridlines locally at a speed >c, but says nothing about two distant areas of gridlines having a speed limit relative to eachother, the objects cannot exceed a local speed of c but if the intervening gridlines between the two local areas around the objects are flexible enough, the two areas can move relative to eachother at any speed. (And in GR spacetime and it's geodesics are pretty bendy).
@@rubberduckie3359
Right, I get that far in my thinking. But I also thought one of the core principles of relativity is that there is no preferred frame of reference. Motion and time in any one frame can only be measured, and only makes sense, relative to some other chosen reference frame.
If the only other frame of reference in the entire universe is that other distant object, then what distinguishes scenario A from B? How does one object "know" in one condition the other object is at >2c because of the expansion of space, and "know" in the other it is not. Or more relevant, how does the object know the speed of it's local space, since at >2c relative velocity it would have no communication with the distant object?
I'm tempted to take the easy way out and just say both are allowed, but you can never accelerate an object locally past c to reach that scenario. However, in an accelerated expansion (like our universe apparently is), there will be a point where these objects cross the same apparent boundaries, and the question of what differentiates the two scenarios remains.
@@richardhosch6073 I could be wrong but I think the point is almost backwards, the objects can't know by observation which situation is true, and that lack of communication is what prevents ftl paradoxes, we are told by the equations that only situation B is possible and we know bc we can't accelerate things to c relative to anything local. Not being able to observe the velocity of your local space is kind of what it means to be in that space no? We can just calculate what the current distance and velocity of the galaxies past this c boundary are from light emitted when we were below this boundary and within causal range of them.
I guess that calculation is kind of disengenuous because from our perspective it's not that far away, it's a distance impossible to traverse and see almost by definition. Maybe in your scenario you could imagine other patches of space to be the 3rd person observers and they would exist even without any objects other than the original 2. That gives a kind of reference frame that doesn't have to factor in c because they can move at any relative speed.
The problem is in defining relative speed. The objects aren't really "moving" away from each other, but new space is appearing between them so their distance increases anyway.
Could you please make a video on Top quarks particularly 🙏🙏 cause they have mass anomaly and confusing .. ❤️
Thank you very much again for your clear explanation .look forward to more.
Wow... the combination of script + illustrations for this episode was spot on... I've never seen that way of visualizing symmetries before and it really clicked.
Hello there👋how are you doing today? Hope you stay blessed as you’re already.God bless you!🥰
Tell me if I'm way off here and this can be easily disproven.
What if mass doesn't bend spacetime and keep it stationary. What if instead, mass actually PULLS spacetime into it. This would explain why we see spacetime stretching everywhere. Because everything that has mass is pulling or stretching (like a conveyor belt) spacetime in thus creating more distance between things.
My gut tells me there's a way to disprove this probably by observing black hole or binary star merges. My only question would be if spacetime is constantly being pulled into the mass then logically there would be a build up of spacetime at the center of the mass. I'm not smart enough to know what that would mean, I'm just thinking logically.
Sorry if all this sounds stupid I'm not experienced in any of this I'm just thinking out loud. I believe outside perspectives are important though so I figured I'd share mine.
just pick up a differential geometry and a tensor calculus book dude it's not that hard after that you can do all the calculations and see for yourself
Problem is that we don't if gravity is emergent property of many particles or if individual particles (or wave function) somehow causes gravity
@@Feefa99 Yeah, I guess I was thinking what if gravity is the movement of spacetime. Like if I'm falling towards something I'm actually just riding spacetime like a conveor belt. Idk though.
I'll definitely have to look into those topics when I get some free time @master shooter64
@@Zordiak I definitely agree with movement of space time, well... warp drive mathematically works
This isn't too far off. You CAN model space near a massive body as infalling, dragging objects along with it. Indeed we can create analogs of black holes via a large tank of water with a drain. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_black_hole )
This CAN lead to apparent stretching; an object closer to a mass will infall more quickly than one further away, leading the distance between them to grow. In extremis this can lead to 'spaghettification'.
The problem arises when we look on larger scales. A string being consumed at both ends will get shorter. A universe containing just gravity will tend to collapse. Early models included outwards velocity to counteract this, mass moving through space countering the inwards tendency. The big question was whether there was enough outwards speed to prevent gravity dominating in a 'big crunch'. In this case space everywhere is being pulled in towards mass and this causes no expansion.
What we seem to see however is that this expansion is not slowing, as would be expected from gravity counteracting it, but speeding up as gravity is overcome. We currently call this 'dark energy'.
Between this and the muon mass both being heavier, is there any way to work backward mathematically and put bounds on the mass of a new particle?
(total layman's opinion) probably, but we also don't know if it's a new particle or multiple, smaller new particles. Also I'm a little unclear on how certain we are that the mass discrepancy is real (although I sure hope it is, for the sake of new physics)
(Also total layman) It could be a massive particle that interacts rarely or weakly or it could be a relatively tiny mass having particle that interacts all the time. I think the fact that we haven't found it in our searches at other mass levels is more restrictive.
(Not a layman)
The problem here is with the electro-weak sector of the Standard Model. The masses of W, Z, and Higgs bosons are all linked by a set of fundamental constants; if one doesn't fit the model while the other two do, you have a big problem, because you can't adjust the constants to account for one without changing the predictions of the others, throwing them out of whack.
Theorists have made a cottage industry out of postulating new fields and resultant particles, but inventing reasons why the new field is seen ONLY IN THIS ONE PARTICULAR CASE is the hard part, and even if you can invent such reasons they can be hard to swallow. That is, such theories can be technically valid, but they fail a sort of parsimony test: better theories are supposed to be simpler, not more complicated. What's the point of the SM if it can't explain what it set out to explain? The SM started from first principles like classical electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Where are we going to get better principles than those?
@@kmarasin Appreciate your insight, thank you!
Great episode, Matt! I finally have grasped a little more of the Higgs mechanism. Even better, I'm more stoked to learn even more. Keep up the great content!
Hello there👋how are you doing today? Hope you stay blessed as you’re already.God bless you!🥰
"We call it SU(2) for...reasons"
*chants in bono* "Yeah! Yeah Yeah!"
I've always wondered why a magnetic field is directed counter clockwise orthogonally to the electrical field. Does any videos of this channel give any insight as to why that is the case and why it can't be directed clockwise without changing the direction of the electrical field?
I don't know if he describes why explicitly but I think the reason why can be inferred from Veritasium's most recent video, actually. Which is pretty interesting in it's own right. th-cam.com/video/oI_X2cMHNe0/w-d-xo.html
It’s just a sign convention. Electricity and magnetism are different aspects of the same thing. Actually, the same thing seen by observers traveling at different speeds. What we call North/South, what we call +/- and what we call clockwise/anti-clockwise can all be flipped, but you must flip 2 of them, not just 1.