The Higgs-Boson field (re)-explained

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1684

by iamwithnail • 12 years ago

6 4 12 years ago

onion2k• 12 years ago

When a newbie developer faces a coding problem they often just keep adding more and more special cases to cope. And then after a long time someone very clever comes along and refactors the whole mess in to a much more simple, beautiful, and structured block of code...

I think physics is going to turn out the same way, only with unified fields instead of nested if statements.

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

Nice try, but it's very difficult to explain the Higgs boson. A few years ago I played the game "explain the Higgs boson to a math mayor" a few times and I always lost.

Some problems with the comic:

* In the frame (8,1) there is a W particle over a balance. The Higgs boson is useful to "explain" the inertial mass, not the gravitational mass. This is nickpicking, but it's also shows that we don't have the correct words in the common language to talk about the Higgs boson.

* In the frame (9,3) says that all the particles should interact with the Higgs field. Really, the massless particles like photon and gluons don't interact with the Higgs field. And the details of the interactions of the others particles are very different. The W, Z particles interact in a different way than the quarks and electron/muou/tau. And the neutrinos probably interact in a different way. To fix the frame, it's enough to change "had to" to "may".

* In frame (11,1) it use the "molasses" word. The problem is that the canonical property of molasses is viscosity, and the Higgs fields don't create a viscosity equivalent. An electron can travel forward as long as it wants, but a ball in molasses stops soon. I think that it's impossible to give a correct explanation of the Higgs boson using the word "molasses".

* In frames (11,1)-(11,2) it apparently shows that without the Higgs boson, all the particles would not interact. But really the other interactions are independent of the Higgs boson.

EDIT: (10,1) -> (11,1) and (10,2) -> (11,2)

nmc• 12 years ago

Good points. However, I will be meta-nitpicking.

You are right, originally Higgs boson is about the inertial mass — gravitational mass may not be the only other. Nevertheless, I find frame (8,1) very appropriate: Higgs boson is actually about the mass of some specific particles. As explained in the comics, the weak force does not have infinite range, so W and Z bosons must have a mass, and the Higgs boson provides just that. I agree with you, though, the drawing is not an accurate illustration, since a bathroom scale does not measure inertial mass — but the idea is there.

Also, frame (10,1) is saying "massless", not "molasses".

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

You are right, "molasses" is in (11,1) and not in (10,1). I just fixed my original comment, and marked the editions.

The Higgs-Boson field (re)-explained

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