Why the Higgs Field Is Nothing Like Molasses, Soup, or a Crowd

https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field-is-nothing-like-molasses-soup-or-a-crowd/

by nyc111 • 2 years ago

68 68 2 years ago

nyc111• 2 years ago

The article is about how higgs field gives mass to particles. This process is so complicated that in order to explain it to laymen physicisits developed a “spherical cow” method. Prof. Strassler thinks this explanation (he calls it a “phib”) is wrong. I agree. But I think the real problem is that in physics the concepts of “particle”, “field” and “mass” do not have universal and precise definitions. So Prof. Strassler uses a concept of “giving mass to particles” but what he calls particles are really waves or maybe a statistical bump in data and we have no idea what mass is. So before the higgs we need a clear definitions of particle, field and mass.

foobarbecue• 2 years ago

Physicists actually use spherical cows-- it's a useful simplification to make calculations tractable. A phib as used here is more like the common "imagine a trampoline with a heavy ball on it" explanation of gravity that I always hated growing up. (Mostly because it's self-referential, but it's other kinds of wrong as well).

Did you read his book? I'm considering it... This blog entry refers the reader to the book for an actual explanation. Annoyed me a bit since I was hoping to find an explanation in the blog entry itself. He says it's too long.

kloch• 2 years ago

Physicists actually use spherical cows-- it's a useful simplification to make calculations tractable

https://x.com/kevinmloch/status/1770484487689798030

hnuser123456• 2 years ago

At the end he shows that he wrote a book that presumably does a better job of building this foundation.

temporarely• 2 years ago

We are simply applying names to distinct phenomena. It doesn't matter what mass is as the question is possibly meaningless. What is important is that particles behave distinctly from waves. And that knowing the mass of something is informative of its expected behavior given a set of circumstances. v=m*a. Possibly this was fact was intentionally underlined by the names given to quarks, including the fact that the behavior no longer maps into an analog in our everyday experience of phenomena so lets just use relational semantics or obscure names to defeat the urge to analogize:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Element...

The only meaningful question around phenomena and meaning is the connection between the two.

Is mind a property of reality or emergent accident? Is matter a figment of mind or is mind a figment of matter?

If that is not what is being sought, beyond that metaphysical query the only reasonable search for meaning behind phenomena is to understand the limits to thought that a conceptual model presents the researchers, so as to avoid dead ends in research direction.

jahnu• 2 years ago

If you want more here is Matt Strassler on Mindscape

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/03/04/267-...

Angostura• 2 years ago

"The trite explanation is misleading, for a good explanation .... buy my book"

empath-nirvana2• 2 years ago

He has multiple links to his own blog posts that explain it also in detail.

cwillu• 2 years ago

And he emphasizes in this post how he finally came up with a good way to explain it, and to read that explanation you need to buy his book.

His old content is great though.

moi2388• 2 years ago

I’m really enjoyed this article. I’ve been bothered with these “Phibs” myself lately, as they often give precisely the wrong intuitions.

I also enjoyed the writing style; ordered the book. Curious to see how technical the explanations are there :)

deepsun• 2 years ago

the Higgs field (like any field!) is more like a property of a substance

So the mass is more like a property of objects? That's mind-blowing!

dist-epoch• 2 years ago

Some substances (particles) interact with the Higgs field, others do not.

Pingk• 2 years ago

As a physics graduate, I always knew the explanation was incomplete (like all analogies, they have to break down somewhere), but laying them out like this was quite surprising.

I've not read his book, but seeing an endorsement by Sean Carroll (a great physics communicator I've seen a few times on the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols), I'm very tempted to get a copy.

dhoe• 2 years ago

I am reading his book. It's quite good, for example I'd never had a good understanding for why the high tides are every twelve hours, and he explains that well in a paragraph. On the minus side, he does cover a lot of things that someone reading a book like this probably knows, and he uses a lot of badly written dialogue.

HarHarVeryFunny7• 2 years ago

Maybe "Higgs soup" is a particularly bad "phib", or mental model, but OTOH I'm sure there are approximately zero non-physicists even aware that the "Higgs Field" is a thing, or at least a thing in the minds of Physicists.

I think phibs, or more generally science-fibs, are mostly harmless and useful. These are mostly introduced at high school level where a simplified (even if flawed) explanation of something can at least give a rough understanding, and introduction to scientific thought process. Better to go through life thinking that color perception is based on light frequencies, and evolution selecting more-fit individuals, than to have no appreciation of how the world works.

I suppose "Higgs soup" is particularly bad in not being a simplified version of the truth, just a poor mental model, but the topic is so esoteric that it seems harmless.

peteradio2• 2 years ago

I don't know, I think its ok to just tell someone that its out of their own grasp to understand the thing at hand and leave it at that. Giving someone a surface level "understanding" ultimately marks them as an idiot in the topic at hand because they will go on to parrot their useless understanding for what purpose?

HarHarVeryFunny7• 2 years ago

I think it depends on the topic. Of course there are always going to be pop-sci magazines trying to explain things like quantum physics to the layman (as if scientists themselves really understand it), so no way to avoid this, but maybe not a lot of value either, even if people enjoy thinking they understand something.

For simpler and more accessible topics though, like the examples I gave, I do think there is value in teaching partially-correct simplifications. For one thing, you have to start somewhere, so if some partial understanding is what sparks some kid's interest into pursuing the sciences, then that is a good thing.

Maybe more importantly(?), given that most people won't be going into science-based jobs, is just having some base level of scientific literacy, especially in a world (particularly the USA) where religious belief and conspiracy theories, rather than rational thought, seem to be in danger of dominating society.

antognini• 2 years ago

There's a clip from a short documentary about Richard Feynman in which the interviewer asks him to explain what's going on when you try to push two magnets together head-to-head. Feynman basically says that he could tell you a story like "there are rubber bands pulling the magnets together," but it would be a lie and that if you really want an explanation you have to learn the physics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

You can get a feel for how it works in this [section][1] of the wikipedia article. Have to know what things like "mass term" mean, though, so there's quite a lot of background required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Abelian_Higgs_...

strogonoff2• 2 years ago

When you say “X is just a simplified version of the truth, a poor mental model”—well, so is everything else in physics.

Everything is a model, if you look closely enough. Atoms, electrons, strings, fields, waves, what have you. The only ground truth is “if we try X, then we observe Y reliably”; we naturally tend to make up models (stories) that make sense to us humans as a shortcut to that truth—that’s just how our minds work—but the entities that appear in those models themselves do not gain absolute existence in some objective reality merely from that.

Tomorrow there will be a better model that may look nothing like the current one; there can be multiple conflicting models that fit different purposes; and if the incompleteness theorem is right then it shall continue forever as we cannot ever build a single provably correct and complete model of the system from within that system. The point of a map is that it does not span the entire extent of the territory.

kurthr• 2 years ago

All models are wrong, some are useful.

-George Box

I'd go further and say that many "theories of everything" that try to remove context from the models, in fact obscure the fundamentally useful approximations. Unless you really need that complicated model for the last fractional percent accuracy, leave it out! Also, knowing (or controlling) the context withing the model is being used is often critical to making something work well for a reasonable cost in a reasonable time.

calf• 2 years ago

The Incompleteness theorem is a about formal theories, so why does the particular ground truth of observation hold as a sound, complete metatheory?

andrewflnr• 2 years ago

They might not immediately recognize "Higgs field" per se, but lots of people have heard of the "Higgs boson" due to all the press about its discovery at CERN. Most of them heard in the next sentence that it has something to do with giving particles mass. I'd guess the vast majority of public who is broadly interested in science has heard of it.

hinkley• 2 years ago

I think anyone who read about the building or operation of the Large Hadron Collider has a faint understanding of Higgs. To explain the boson educators tend to mention the field as well.

matkoniecz3• 2 years ago

Better to go through life thinking that color perception is based on light frequencies

wait, is it not?

evolution selecting more-fit individuals

Do you mean that it is simplification from "more-fit individuals are more likely but not certain to be selected"?

ysofunny2• 2 years ago

it's the underlying physical phenomenon. but color is apparently more in your head (brain/mind) than in the light itself.

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

wait, is it not?

What frequency is magenta?

HarHarVeryFunny7• 2 years ago

We sense color by light frequency, but our actual perception of it (what color we think something is) is far more complex.

Here's a classic illusion. The strawberries in this photo are not red.

https://petapixel.com/2017/03/01/photo-no-red-pixels-fascina...

This has to do with "color constancy" - we learn to see the same object in different lighting conditions as being the same color, even thought the light frequencies reflected may be different.

We basically see what we predict we'll see.

Evolution really acts on populations, not individuals, and often it's more about the environment changing than the population. Basically isolated populations of a species interbreed and (as a population) accumulate genetic changes as long as they are mostly benign. Then, once in a while ("punctuated equilibrium") something in the environment changes - food supply, pathogen, weather, etc, and some of these long-term accumulated changes (maybe collectively) suddenly become important and result in one population surviving/thriving better than another.

mkehrt• 2 years ago

I assume what they meant was that only some colors are pure frequencies, and most are more complex waveforms. As the sibling comment gestures at, "magenta" is the sum of a pure blue wave plus a pure red wave.

"Color" also can refer to several different phenomena which were historically conflated in a way that made teasing apart certain observations difficult. It's a property of objects (apples are red), a property of light (lasers are red) and a property of perception (I see red).

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Is there a mental model analogy generator? As in it just generates strange/nonsensical analogies to poke the envelope?

E.g:

Higgs-fire: burning mass to generate time/gravity ...

abeppu• 2 years ago

Some years ago, I found a way to explain how the Higgs field works that is non-technical and yet correct
But it did fit quite well in a course for non-experts, in which I had several hours to lay out the basics of particle physics before addressing the Higgs field’s role.

So, no known better concise explanation then. Maybe it's worth workshopping a _less_ incorrect explanation which resolves some but not all of the primary criticisms, so there's something useful to say to people who aren't prepared to sit through a book or several hours of a course?

petsfed4• 2 years ago

For instance, instead of: "There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As objects move through it, the soup slows them down, and that’s how they get mass."

Say: "You know how, if you push your potato bit around in your soup, it starts to slow and eventually stops when you stop pushing it? We could plot the speed of the potato bit over time, and we'd notice that as soon as we stopped pushing, the potato bit's speed drops to zero. The Higgs field has a similar effect on an object's acceleration as the soup has on the potato bit's speed. How much the field affects the object's acceleration apparently defines the object's mass. I say "apparently", because the exact way the mass is defined is incompatible with this simplistic analogy. But as we can see with the potato bit in the soup, the effective 'soup mass' of the potato bit is a complicated function of the things around it, as well as the bit's intrinsic characteristics."

...

As a physicist by training, who once held ambitions to teach this stuff, I'm frequently very frustrated by people criticizing how physics is taught through (frequently very flawed) analogies, or via toy models. And part of my frustration is that the people who make these criticisms never had to try to teach the information to anyone who needed to know it. Its very easy to give a technically correct, fantastically nuanced, and perfectly incoherent-to-the-layman account of just about anything in physics. While a sufficiently focused student can derive all of known electromagnetic theory (including relativistic phenomena) just from Maxwell's equations, the standard graduate-level textbook on electrodynamics weighs more than 3 pounds, because that simplicity of expression is deeply misleading.

Part of why Feynman's elementary physics lectures were so popular amongst his peers was because he had a way of picking analogies that cast light into the shadows created by the biases from their own years of study. But if you aren't already inculcated to the vagaries of physics nomenclature, even Feynman, the most celebrated physics educator of the modern era, is hard to parse. You MUST develop the intuitions of a physicist to understand what makes his introductory lectures so insightful. So when Feynman says "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.", it's less an expression of how poorly he understands it, but rather an expression of how "can I explain this in under an hour to a disinterested 19 year old?" is a really poor a metric of understanding. Granted, there's a ton of background knowledge baked into the observation that "spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics" (in that incident that caused the quote). Its ultimately a pretty trivial calculation, once you understand how statistical mechanics is derived, but getting to that point is not at all trivial.

hi41• 2 years ago

Don’t much about quantum physics. Please bear with. Many years back when I was in school, I learned that weight is not primary property of matter but mass is the primary property of matter. So now mass is not the primary property of matter and it happens because of the interaction with Higgs field? If mass is no longer a primary property of matter, then what is?

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Hum... Your framing as "the primary property" is bad here, and it looks like all properties appear because of the interaction with some field.

(But well, there's a "then explain gravity!" that you can throw at any generic explanation.)

empath-nirvana2• 2 years ago

Weight is a measure of a force on an object due to gravity or acceleration. Mass is a measure of a object's inertia -- it's resistance to change in velocity due to an outside force.

Rest mass is a fixed quantity inherent to the object), weight changes based on the environment/reference frame -- your weight is different on the moon, but your mass is the same.

Matter is just perturbations in a variety of fields that have complex interactions with each other -- those interactions are what give rise to mass. the higgs field is one of the fields that create mass, most importantly in electrons, but when you measure the mass of any full sized object, almost all of the mass has nothing to do with the higgs field and has to do with the fact that protons are actually balls of quarks and gluons moving very rapidly in a confined space because of their self interactions.

Newtonip• 2 years ago

I've been reading Matt Strassler's blog for over a decade now.

I really like how unlike other science communicators in many of his articles he assumes you have some university level education. It explains concepts I have not found outside actual textbooks but in a way that is very understandable to an engineer such as myself.

earthboundkid• 2 years ago

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%20of%20...

Syzygies• 2 years ago

But is a Higgs Field like a Monad?

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

No, a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

_akhe5• 2 years ago

I remember "The God Particle" media craze of ~2012 and how it was supposed to reveal the source of mass in the universe, and it being a huge letdown when they said there is basically a cosmic molasses permeating all of space, and that mass is "draped" over particles by the molasses.

Everybody immediately lost interest in the subject when we realized we were all being played. The authors of the books and scientists who received the funding are all richer than before, but we're no closer to knowing where atomic mass comes from.

CERN and the Large Hadron Collider - <JoeRogan>sometimes I don't know man!</JoeRogan> My conspiracy gears start turning knowing how many billions of dollars have flowed into this project with relatively little innovation & discovery coming out of it.

This article both: 1) Acknowledges that previous Higgs claims aren't true and 2) Descopes the role of the Higgs away from its "God" like mass-giving properties and to something a lot more niche and speculative:

"In fact, the Higgs field only generates the masses of the known elementary particles. More complex particles such as protons and neutrons — and therefore the atoms, molecules, humans and planets that contain them — get most of their mass in another way."

So atoms, molecules, humans and planets - anything you can actually observe and test doesn't get its mass from the Higgs. Only invisible stuff that you can only see at CERN works that way?

It's too bad this work is not generally observable, testable, falsifiable, and that it requires a $5 billion black box and literal nobles to even conduct experiments (don't worry, they're planning a $25 billion one by 2038).

And besides... "soup"? "molasses"? These sound so dreary, might as well call it "cosmic porridge". They should call it the King Particle and say that it "bestowes" mass unto the particles by Divine Right - that should make everyone happy.

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

The Higgs mechanism was always only needed to explain the mass of the elementary particles. It was always known that the mass of protons and neutrons, which account for 99.999% of the mass of atoms, is itself explained mostly by E=mc² from the energy of the strong force (interactions between the quarks which make up the proton & neutron).

However, the mass of the electron is measurable, and the mass of a mole of water for example would be measurably different if the electron had 0 mass. And since the electron is not made up of anything, its mass can't be explained by the same mass-energy equivalence. The same is true for the mass of quarks, which do account for a tiny but measurable fraction of the mass of the proton and neutron.

There were also other possible explanations for these masses. The Higgs was not the only candidate theory for this. So, the LLC achieved a monumental task: it confirmed which theory accurately accounts for the mass of these particles, and proved that the final piece of the Standard Model puzzle is now known.

_akhe5• 2 years ago

It was mostly intended as a joke, though I really do have conCERNs about CERN and their funding:results ratio.

A few things that stood out in your rebuttal:

E=mc2

Isn't this mass-energy equivalence, not a theory about why atoms have mass in the first place? Thought it was called "The God Particle" because it set out to explain "how particles got their mass" - AKA where material reality comes from, not a theory like E=mc2 at all?

both quarks and electrons are measurable yet have 0 mass

Isn't there a wave:particle duality not just of light but all subatomic particles such that it can't be proven they are particles ("mass") at all but just motion propagation ("energy")?

proved that the final piece of the Standard Model

Did it really? This theory says that the world is ultimately particles doesn't it?

it confirmed which theory accurately accounts for the mass of these particles

With the molasses analogy it did that? How do you figure?

Great discussion! Love this topic.

zackmorris• 2 years ago

An explanation for how the Higgs field gives mass to other particles is buried in the links at the bottom of the article:

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

  Because of the simple interaction between the S and Z fields with strength y,  a non-zero equilibrium value S0 for the S field gives the Z quantum a mass proportional both to y and to S0.
  
  The S field’s non-zero value has given mass to the particle of the Z field!

Basically particles are quanta of a field away from its equilibrium value. The nonzero equilibrium value of the Higgs field gives particles in other fields their masses, due to the coupling of the fields, if I read this right (I'm sure I didn't).

I wish he would have mentioned if the Z field is related to the Z boson:

https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/z-b...

  The Z’s don’t hang around very long. Being so heavy, they decay into all kinds of things: quarks, muons, neutrini, you name it! Like the W’s, they appear for something like 3x10^-25 seconds before decaying. A photon can’t even get across a proton that quickly.

Unfortunately naming collisions are frequent in physics, and I don't have time to dive into it and assign the two Z into proper namespaces. Also there's no way to understand part of this without understanding all of it, similarly to how often there's no way to use one service in AWS without understanding many unrelated services like IAM, because of its use of 20th century metaphors like identity/access control by source address instead of doing it "the web way" by granting access via a key. The web way allows us to step up to a higher level of abstraction and not get mired in minutia.

Why I worry about this is because the gluon in the strong force is self-interacting:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-finall...

Which suggests to me that it's actually two or more things that are each not self-interacting. But the noncontextual terminology and thick notation of particle physics leads one to stop at the notion of a gluon and not question its oddities, or never arrive at understanding it in the first place. So here we get distracted by trying to remember names rather than coming up with better models for what happens in the span of light crossing a proton, which we can't see anyway.

I just feel more and more that bigger accelerators aren't going to solve this stuff, because the real problem is that only a few dozen scientists in the world actually understand quantum mechanics. Its sort of like how tensors are hard to reason about, and maybe it's worth scrapping them and going back to matrices holding various types because that's more approachable for humans. I would compare the problem to how the use of single letters for variable names made C code in the 1990s harder to read than Javascript today. I wish we had the time, money and resources to refactor physics so that more people could be involved with brainstorming. Short of that, I'm hopeful that AI will summarize this stuff so that we can work with it more like, I dunno, geometry.

Why the Higgs Field Is Nothing Like Molasses, Soup, or a Crowd

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