Dennis Overbye does us all a huge favor by coming clean about “the God Particle.” The phrase refers to the hypothetical Higgs boson, long-time target of particle physics experiments. It was coined by Leon Lederman as a shameless ploy to sell books, and ever since has managed to appear in every single mention of the Higgs in the popular media — for example, in the headline of Dennis’s article from a couple of weeks ago.
Physicists, regardless of their stance toward timeless theological questions, hate this phrase. For one thing, it puts this particular boson on a much higher pedestal than it deserves, without conveying anything helpful about what makes it important. But more importantly, it loads an interesting but thoroughly materialist idea with absolutely useless religious overtones. Even harmful overtones — as Lederman himself notes, his coinage came about just around the time when creationism began to (once again) become a big problem, and this confusion was the last thing that anyone needed.
Furthermore, everyone knows that “the God particle” is misleading — even all of the journalists and headline writers who keep trotting it out. It’s just too damn irresistible. Particle physics is fascinating, but it takes some effort to convey the real excitement felt by experts to people who are watching from the sidelines, and a hook is a hook, shameless or not. If my job were writing about particle physics for a general audience, I doubt I’d be able to resist the temptation.
But, as Dennis notes, this God-talk is part of a venerable tradition on the part of physicists. We use “God” all the time to refer the workings of Nature, without meaning anything religious by it. Or at least, we used to; the nefarious encroachment of Intelligent Design and the religious right on our national discourse has given some of us pause. In the past I could have given a talk and said “Either you need a dynamical origin for the primordial cosmological perturbations, or you just have to accept that this is how God made the universe,” without any worry whatsoever that the physicists in the audience would have been confused. They would have known perfectly well that I was just using a colorful metaphor for “that’s just how the universe is,” in a purely cold-hearted and materialistic fashion. Nowadays I find myself avoiding such language, or substituting “Stephen Hawking” for “God” in a desperate attempt to preserve some of the humor.
All of which is to say: religion is impoverishing our language. I want God back, dammit.
“Babel particle” makes me think of Snow Crash.
George, yes, lots of things would certainly be different if quarks were massless. But it nucleons would still have roughly 1GeV of mass.
And every particle physicist in the world would put you on a pedestal if you chose to explain the Higgs (particle/field/mechanism) in terms of symmetry-breaking rather than mass-giving. The former is the real point, the latter is a spinoff that gets attention because it’s a bit easier to immediately grasp. It’s just hard to explain the symmetry-breaking business to your friend on the elevator. Especially when you’re breaking SU(2)xU(1) down to U(1), and people might be puzzled by what that means. (You would like to say “before EW symmetry breaking, W’s and Z’s were just like photons,” which is kind of true, but not exactly, because of the abelian vs. non-abelian thing.)
I seem to be playing the role of the pedant on this post, sorry…but one of the issues that came up for me in previous discussions (e.g on Clifford’s blog ) is trying to come up with a good explanation of the Higgs mechanism. I think there is actually a physics issue there…
The problem is that gauge symmetry is no symmetry at all, just a redundancy in the description, so all the nice mental pictures one has from studying global symmetry and its breaking (for example in the theory of phase transition) are not quite right…technically speaking they are not gauge invariant. We also know that in some cases (following Fradkin- Shenker and others) there is no gauge invariant distinction between the Higgs mechanism and other mass-giving phenomena such as confinement.
So, I for one would be grateful for an intuitive explanation of the Higgs mechanism. It may well be that the mass-giving, and not the symmetry-breaking, is the important aspect after all, but I am not sure.
Perhaps, if Leon Lederman had invented that term a few years earlier, Congress would not have killed the SSC?
Moshe, true enough, and that would be even more awesome to get across. Except that I would still argue that mass-generating is not the important point, since other things also happen. Perhaps “phase-transitioning” is the real point.
I much prefer the Oh my God particle.
Sean- that’s the thing, no other things are happening when the Higgs gets a VEV, no change in order parameter, no changes in global symmetry structure etc. etc., that’s why I am struggling to find a good intuitive explanation. Indeed, maybe the phase-transitioning is the only point, if that really is a word.
Moshe, Sean: can you put some flesh on the bones of the phase-transition description? That is, without one utterance of the term “gauge symmetry”, can you explain what exactly the phases in question are and why the transition cleaves the EW interaction?
George
I certainly cannot. The phase transition is simply the statement that the theory exists in two different phases, where the weak interactions are either long range or short range. The two phases are not distinguished by any other physical characteristics (order parameter) so it is difficult to come up with something that passes as an explanation. I’d really be happy to learn about such an intuitive explanation, but the things one usually hears conflate global and local symmetry breaking, which are mathematically similar but physically very different.
So, I for one would be grateful for an intuitive explanation of the Higgs mechanism.
Imagine how those of us who are trying to follow progress in this area from a lay perspective feel! I greatly appreciate all the effort put into making these difficult but important concepts more accessible.
It’s very interesting to me that Moshe brings up the gauge symmetry (or non-symmetry) in this regard, as that has always been another plainly critical area in which I have had difficulty formulating an intuitive understanding. Indeed, it often seems to form the limit at which my understanding of a given subject fails, or becomes entirely metaphorical.
I for one applaud the dogged “pedantry.”
FWIW, this sort of issue is why I no longer rely on science journalists at all. No offense to George and the others who are working hard to get it right, but one information-lossy translation (from rigorous mathematical science to a non-expert-comprehensible english formulation) is bad enough. For that translation then to be re-filtered through a third party is simply too much. Thus the value I place on forums such as this one.
It’s like running MP3 compression on a CD audio file – which is bad enough, it amazes me that people claim they can’t hear the difference – and then re-encoding the resulting MP3 file using another lossy codec. The end result is full of noise artifacts and lacks articulation in the details across the spectrum, especially at the limits. In many cases important aspects of the original idea (or song ;o) are completely lost.
Deus ex machina particle could work.
And it has “God” in it, albeit in Latin.
I thought that the Egyptians worshipped the Delta, Lemurians worsipped the Mu, sleepwalkers worshipped the Z, Hugh Hefner worshipped the Top, Simple Simon worshipped the Pi, Gell-Mann and Joyce worshippede the Quark, magicians worshipped the Charm, catfish worshipped the Bottom, H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort worshipped the Strange, Republicans worshipped the W, and Yiddish speakers worshipped the Nu.
I use the phrase “God gave us this/that” all the time. It seems funner and more engaging/forceful than the pedestrian “imagine we are given this by fiat….”.
Personally, I don’t think I would change anyone’s minds about whether God exists or not. I am not so worried too about what the listener perceives what I believe in, as long as I get the point across.
As for the “God Particle” business, I propose a new name :
The Uber-Particle.
Take that LL!
Well, they called it “The God Particle” because it (its field) supposedly gives other particles mass, which must be done to avoid some sort of chaos or undefined reality, I suppose. Would everything otherwise be like photons? But with the equivalence of mass-energy, would energy would still have an equivalent mass, or would even that be meaningless without the Higgs mechanism? In any case, it would be helpful to get a good middle-brow explanation of why there really, assuredly, needs to be something to provide a fundamental characteristic like mass, not just how it works. I mean, why can’t mass have been fundamental, or why not other ideas like acceleration coupling to the zero-point field, etc? As for extra implications, how does Higgs figure in now, to dark energy etc? Thanks.
I think that the point Moshe is raising is important, though I can’t help him find an intuitive explanation. His point that gauge “symmetry” isn’t a symmetry in any meaningful sense is the real blockbuster, because we have famous physicists going around saying things like “symmetry is all” blah blah blah. Long ago I attended a class on the differential geometry of gauge theory, and by the end it dawned on me that differential geometers don’t really care about gauge transformations, and the idea that connections exist “because” you “need to make gauge invariance local” just makes them giggle.
Meanwhile, Sean said “in my personal hierarchy”….wasn’t he afraid that physicists would be confused by such religious language? By the way, are physicists confused by religious locutions like, “Holy shit!!” ?
The Higgs mechanism is often compared to superconductivity in introductory textbooks. And this is more than just an analogy, see e.g. here 🙂
Yeah, there is that, nicely summarized by Weinberg’s “Superconductivity For Particular Theorists”(Prog.Theor.Phys.Suppl.86:43,1986). This only pushes the issue one step back…
(Also, probably should be obvious but I should say this issue definitely is nitpicking. I just wish I had better analogy to use, so I am asking…)
This is slightly OT, but … given that a hadron’s mass is dominated by binding effects, I wonder what the prospects are of experimentally measuring an anisotropy in, say, a proton’s acceleration in response to a force.
My understanding is that the force required to accelerate a composite object will depend on the whole stress-energy tensor, not just the object’s total energy. Since the stress-energy tensor of a proton would not be isotropic, it ought to be a little bit harder to push around in some directions than others. Its spin axis would distinguish these directions, but the effect I’m talking about has nothing directly to do with spin; it’s a matter of how pressure and tension transform into changes of energy density under boosts.
I don’t know anywhere near enough QCD even to guess the order of magnitude of this effect for a proton. Any experts care to comment?
Greg, there are lots of equivalence-principle experiments that try to measure the different accelerations of objects made from different materials, and the people who do such experiments and make predictions for them definitely know that the baryon mass comes mostly from QCD, and are on the lookout for any deviations from the standard wisdom.
Sean, thanks for the reply. I’m still curious, though, as to whether anyone’s quantified the effect I mentioned, and if so whether or not it’s so ridiculously small as to be beyond all hope of measuring.
Just to be clear, I’m certainly not suggesting any “deviations from the standard wisdom” here; unless I’ve misunderstood something basic in relativistic continuum mechanics (which is always possible), standard SR implies that anisotropic composite objects can have anisotropic responses to force. For example, an object under tension accelerates differently depending on whether the applied force is parallel to, or orthogonal to, the tension. What I’m far less clear about is whether the structure of a proton is such that there is a net effect of this nature, and if there is, whether it could conceivably come within the range of experimental measurement.
The current best in science is clearly an House of Word Definiton Mirrors that can only be notated in meaningful way by compex problematic math —which math has completed obscured local event detailed mechanics. A comletrion of Einstein’s deterministic universe is avaiable at my website for those who would like to quit playing with words and actually mind’s eye see ir all in infinite mechanical detail. The Universal Harmony (UH)=designer God real time self assembles and unasembles visible matter (VM)— as that VM is interactively immersed by ideal fluid dark matter that fills all space-time in a “no-force-at-a-distance-way” for an infinite, stable and closed, non-problematic universe. A gross simplification of Einstein’s field Equation does the trick G = R/3(v-squared) see details at website. That UH- Designer God allows organic matter to space-time build conizance that allows itself free will — and therefore problematic, trial & error existence.
I’m a biologist. I’m glad that you are reluctant to use “God language” nowadays. Einstein used it, and look at how his quotes are misused, even in comments on this page. I hope the George Deutsch ‘Big Bang “Theory”‘ dust-up made physicists realize that the Fundagelicals are not just a threat to biology, but to all of science.
Moshe,
Can’t we take the asymptotic value of the Higgs doublet to be the order parameter? This is invariant under local gauge transformations, but I get confused about whether I should call this a “physical” quantity or not.
Greg Egan,
Although I don’t know the answer to your question, the two places I would look first are limitations to the “emittance” of proton beams in accelerator physics (a brief check there indicated that other effects are much more dominant) and formation of antihydrogen (which I didn’t check, try for example the webpages of the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments at CERN) which is extraordinarily sensitive to (anti-)proton dynamics.
Good luck. If anyone knows more please correct me.