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Ok, so this unanswered question in fundamental physics is of such importance that it led to a search of over 40 years for the Higgs boson and finally the construction of one of the most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, the Large Hadron Collider Can you say Woof !!

In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one of the four components of the Higgs field, constituting a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components, and forms a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. Hello, knock, knock.

Work done on superconductivity and "broken" symmetries around 1960 led physicist Philip Anderson to suggest in 1962 a new kind of solution that might hold the key. In 1964 a theory was created by 3 different groups of researchers, that showed the problems could be resolved if an unusual kind of field existed throughout the universe. It would cause existing particles to acquire mass instead of new massless particles being formed. Hello, knock, knock.

Any particle physicists out there? I'm optical but know the math. JWE

I am no scientist, but love reading and watching information about it on television. (In high school, our chemistry teacher was more interested in getting the work done for his master's, and our physics teacher could not speak English well enough to order a pepsi!)

What intrigues me is the idea of the extra dimensions (up to 11) proposed by string theorists (I think it was them!) and how that would fit into that universal field (could that be one of the fields, or more?)you mentioned. Throw in dark matter, dark energy, maybe even the Grand Unified Field Theory - and whatever other incredible ideas surface for understanding the fundamental structure of physical existence. Sometimes I feel like humanity is roughly akin to a bacterial culture floating in the interior of a bubble in the midst of a huge ocean which it cannot sense. Hells Jingling Bells - we can barely find a way to get along with each other for more than a few moments, let alone look at the cosmos and challenge that!

And I have no mathematics for that - or for my belief that there is a being who created all that!

Symon,

Is that all really necessary background research for your current project of writing on French frigates and ships of the line.[:)]

Speaking of which, and seeing I've taken this OT anyway, do you concur with the views of N A M Rodger in chapter 27 of his book, The Command of the Ocean (2004).

Alfred

Hi John,

I’m no physicist, but know some maths, and have been wondering about that too. Here is what I think I’ve figured so far (waiting for some serious person to chime in and correct this, which is probably very wrong).

To me it all starts with Lagrange. In Lagrange reformulation of mechanics, every time you can spot an invariant (something that doesn’t change over time), you can derive a physical law out of it. Somehow, Lagrange says : one invariant, one conserved quantity, one law.

The next house down the road is Noether’s. She says those conserved quantities, ie invariants, ie laws, correspond to symmetries. For instance, stability over time, a symmetry, corresponds to one conserved quantity, which is energy. Stability over space, a symmetry, corresponds to one conserved quantity, momentum. So, Noether says that one conserved quantity, ie one property, one symmetry, or the other way around.

This is where group theory comes in. Groups are the tool of choice to represent symmetries (they were invented for that). Note, by the way, that groups are also used to define properties (via orbits, and quotient spaces). So, you now have something like, one transformation group, one symmetry, one conserved quantity, one law… and you’re probably beginning to realize that you should have listened a bit more intently during those algebra classes.

Another house down the road from Lagrange is Maxwell. Maxwell explains how some invariants (aka properties), corresponding to interactions, can be represented as fields. And then Hamilton provided the next reformulation of mechanics, an improved version of Lagrange, which unifies invariants/conserved quantities and fields. In Hamitonian mechanics, conserved quantities and symmetries become pairs of conjugate variables. Space symmetry means position is conjugate to momentum, time symmetry that energy is conjugate to time, and this results in Heisenberg inequalities, which are properties of the Fourier transform.

Better still, in Hamilton theory, fields are not handled differently from other variables/symmetries. At this point, we’re almost ready to say : one symmetry, one conserved quantity, one property/variable, one law, one field. This is what gauge theory does for you, which nicely connect the Noether road to the Hamilton road.

All this would probably have remained theoretical, a mathematical curiosity if you like, but for Quantum mechanics. Quantum physics observes that small objects in our real world sometimes look like they're some wave thing, extending over space, local fields..., and sometimes, especially when you look at them, as “local objects”, or properties. So we’re having “stuff” that is both a field, and an property, that we wand to united into one single reformulation of mechanics… Oh wait, we've seen that before!

So, in Quantum mechanics, objects are both fields and particles, and you can explain quantization (the fact that properties take a discrete set of values) as a property of the field (eigenvalues of something, I believe), or one of the underlying transformation group (characteristic, order, whatever). And if this is good for particles, it is good for their properties, spin, color, charge, which are so many symmetries, and therefore so many fields, and therefore so many particles (quarks, and bosons, and…).

Which leads to yet another reformulation : any property you observe has to correspond to a specific symmetry, which must be a field, which has to be a particle… And then, having mass, which is a symmetry some particles enjoy (but not all), has to correspond to a field, which then means there must be a particle behind it… call it Higgs (Ishmael was already taken)…

Why was the Higgs boson so difficult to detect ? It is all Hamilton’s fault again. Theory says such a particle has to have very high energy (and mass since it is a boson), and as energy and time are conjugate, high energy means short life. I’m not quite sure why the high energy, probably something with the locality of the field (the more they extend, the higher the mass? ).

This is what I think I’ve figured, and would love to have someone correct for me… Take all of this with a grain of salt, I wasn’t trained in physics, and my maths are very rusted…

Francois

ORIGINAL: Alfred
Symon,

Is that all really necessary background research for your current project of writing on French frigates and ships of the line.[:)]

Just frigates, not doing liners.

Speaking of which, and seeing I've taken this OT anyway, do you concur with the views of N A M Rodger in chapter 27 of his book, The Command of the Ocean (2004).

Alfred

Partially. Gardiner says much the same but isn't quite as damning. Agree French and British ships were designed for different strategic imperatives and served their respective purposes. Don't agree that French ships were 'weakly' built of 'inferior' timber in the way it is so often described. That's actually the point of my book project; build a cross section of a French and British frigate in miniature detailing the construction and fastening techniques, scantling, appointments, and a modern architectural appraisal of the respective hull forms.

Ciao. J

And since we are totally OT from bosons and such, you have to know that Francois Charton was/is instrumental in dealing with le service historique de la défense for me. He was the man who got into le centre d’archives du ministère de la défense and found exactly what I wanted. A man for all seasons and a really smart one, too. I put him at the top of my list of people to listen to. Think you should too.

BTW, he lives in the country and is looking to build dams, and does canoes, and is a righteous river man. He knows his wines and I expect his kitchen to be a similar place. A man I will certainly visit.

Ciao. J

Shoot Francois, the Hamiltonian says that the Higgs boson is it's own anti-particle. Everything we see says the same thing. Jeez, symetry is such a wonderful thing. Says mass IS and anti-mass ISN'T. Ok, so one creation event in the Super Hadron Collider yielded two hyper energenic photons with opposite spin. It's the energy of those photons that suggest the collision event involved something 'different'.

It's that same photon energy that seems to seems to imply life in the standard particle universe. But just look at the magnitudes of the photon energies of the excited pairs and the mass/energy density of what's expected. Once again, the issue of dark matter and it's associated energy density rears it's ugly head. Woof !!

I was just getting comfy with photon energies, till those particle people started filling out the last boxes of the Standard Model. Woof , woof !!!

Damn !! OK !! So how are your wiers coming? You got your river flowing to get you a good canoe ride? You got a couple bottles of decent Beaujolais you and I can drink when I come visit?

Ciao. John.

Shoot Francois, the Hamiltonian says that the Higgs boson is it's own anti-particle.

That would make it a type of mog...

OH, NO !!! PIZZA THE HUT !!!

Okey Dokey, then, in that same vein. How can you tell if it's a quantum mechanical duck?

Woops, forgot to mention .. this is a test. Hint, the answer is in the Feynman Lectures. J

Might be a while before I have a go at that question. Painting & (hopefully!) tiling the house we just bought so we can move in next weekend. Body has exactly enough energy left to breath. None for brain.