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.
“We do ourselves a great disservice by labeling the mysterious order of quarks and quasars with the name of a storm-bringer once worshiped on a patch of land beside the Mediterranean Sea.”
Actually, the Mediterranean storm-bringer’s current followers are presumptuous to claim exclusive rights to the use of “god.” This is no more Yahweh’s name than it is Isis’ or Odin’s name.
I’d think that calling it the “god particle” is irksome to fundies – though that’s not a good enough reason to keep doing it.
For any HEP type: The Higgs field is a scalar field that is suppose to permeate all of space and interact with other particles (fields) to produce mass. Now does the Higgs field have a “constant value” for all space or does it vary? If it varies what causes the variation and how is it transmitted over space and at what speed? Does the Higgs particle have a mass? If so (I believe it is suppose to) what gives it its mass? A very nonlinear interaction?
Ellipsis, thanks for the tips! I’ve had no luck yet, but I’ll keep looking.
FWIW, a naive back-of-the-envelope calculation (in which I trust Wikipedia that the force between gluons is of the order of 100 N, and I treat the mass and radius of the proton as being the relevant parameters for determining density and tension) implies that, in geometric units, the tension-to-density ratio is about 6 parts in 10^4. But I don’t know how that would vary with direction in a proton’s ground state, or how close it is to what a genuine QCD calculation would yield.
Cecil — please try Wikipedia and come back if you have questions. Any field that has a particle, i.e. a wave packet, associated with it, of course needs to vary in space
Greg — if a decent calculation (even a classical mechanics one) indicates that it might be an observable effect at an experiment similar to ATRAP or ATHENA, wait a few days to think (and make sure you haven’t made a mistake), and then send an e-mail to Gerry Gabrielse or one of his colleagues. They’ll probably correct you, but that’s OK.
Having looked at some recent research (Shape of the Proton, Gerald A. Miller), it seems the wave function is still so imperfectly understood that the kind of effect I’m envisaging would be swamped by the error bars in any current experiment.
Greg, the effect you are looking for simply doesn’t exists in a theory consistent with Special Relativity. Applying the same force in different directions for the same time will accelerate an anisotropic body to the same speeds in the respective directions, provided you start with the object at rest.
The crucial thing here is that the momentum of the body is zero when you start to accelerate it…
Cecil,
Yes, the Higgs vev can take different values at different points in space, giving rise to topological defects such as monopoles, cosmic strings, and domain walls.
Cecil,
In answer to your other question–the Higgs does have a mass, and it arises from a non-linear self-interaction
Religionism, the practice of religion in order to create more religion and gain power and wealth by it, is the problem, not the institution of religion itself.
And now that this religionism can be manipulated for votes increases its power to disrupt the ordinary proceedings of society.
The people who created ID, coordinate attacks on science, and try to legislate the Bible have a vested interest in doing so.
Ellipsis:
I read the article(s). My questions apparently can be answered in the affirmative. However, I have a more general question concerning scalar fields that are suppose to permeate all of space. During inflation when space is expanding at several times the speed of light, the accepted wisdom is that the scalar field(s) will expand allong with space and maintain the same energy density, save quantum variations. Did the Higgs field exist during inflation? If not when did it come into existance? What caused it? Is the idea of a scalar field that permeates all of space and can travel faster than the speed of light bother anyone? If not why not? I know: no information is conveyed. That seems like a copout. Where are the dynamical equations that describe this field during inflation? Not space but this field.
Thanks to everyone who wants to chime in and set me on the correct path of understanding this issue, which has troubled me every since inflation was predicted.
Hi Cecil — two of the world’s experts on that very issue are Mark and Sean (not me!)
Count Iblis, I’m about 80% sure I’m right, but I’m self-educated in this subject and if you can come up with a reference to a published result in relativistic continuum mechanics that contradicts my claim I’ll be very interested to read it.
As I understand it, the nice simple formula they teach in elementary SR relating four-force, rest mass and four-acceleration, F=ma, is only strictly true for point particles (though in most situations it should be a very good approximation). A continuum object needs to be analysed with a stress-energy tensor, and if that tensor is anisotropic, the force needed to achieve acceleration of the body in different directions will be anisotropic too. (You emphasise the notion of “starting with the object at rest”, but that’s implicit in the whole idea of proper acceleration anyway: you measure proper acceleration in a frame co-moving with the body’s centre-of-mass.)
To take one simple example, suppose you have an elastic string being trailed by a uniformly accelerating body. I’ve analysed this scenario for a simple linear model of elasticity on this page. It’s not hard to show that conservation of energy-momentum, i.e. setting the divergence of the stress-energy tensor of the material to zero, yields the equation:
(1/s) [rho(s)+p(s)] + p'(s) = 0
where s is a spatial coordinate measured orthogonal to the world lines of the Rindler frame for the accelerating body, rho(s) is the proper density of mass-energy in the material (including elastic potential energy), and p(s) is the pressure (which will be negative, as the string will be under tension).
Now -p'(s) gives the net force on an infinitesimal element of the string, and (1/s) gives the acceleration of the hyperbolic world lines in a Rindler frame. So this equation resembles “F=ma”, but instead of rho(s) alone — the proper mass-energy of our element of string — we have rho(s)+p(s). This is due to the fact that the pressure/tension in an accelerating body is changing direction in space-time, and contributing to the momentum density.
However, if we calculate the force/acceleration relationship for an acceleration in a direction in which there is no tension, we will get a different effective inertial mass: just rho(s). So there is an anisotropic response to applied force.
Another example is the case of a rotating ring of elastic material. The total mass-energy of the ring in the centre-of-mass frame will be modified by kinetic and elastic potential energy, and if you compute the force needed to accelerate the ring with a given proper acceleration, a, in a direction orthogonal to the plane of the ring, it will simply be proportional to that total mass-energy. But if you accelerate the ring in the plane of rotation, the constant of proportionality, the effective inertial mass, will be different.
Another way to look at all this is to think about boosts. When you have a point particle, it simply possesses an energy-momentum vector, P, and its total energy as measured by an observer with 4-velocity u is just E=P.u. If you start with a particle at rest, E will initially equal m=|P|, and if you apply a boost to P then E will transform in a very simple way, which will be independent of the direction of the boost.
But when you have a composite system, E is found by integrating T^{00}, the time-time component of the system’s stress-energy tensor T. You can also integrate all four time components, T^{0a}, to get a total energy-momentum vector P. But even if you start with the centre-of-mass of the system at rest (i.e. the total momentum of the body in the observer’s reference frame is zero), if you apply a boost to T, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the change in E will be independent of the direction of the boost.
I wrote:
Sorry, that assertion was dead wrong. The total energy-momentum vector you get by integrating T^{0a} for a closed system will transform like an ordinary 4-vector (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, page 145, makes this clear), so the change in E will be independent of the direction of the boost.
This doesn’t change the rest of my argument. As I’ve said, I’m not 100% certain about any of this, but it seems clear that tension does modify the effective inertial mass of a composite object, and so anisotropic tension should give rise to an anisotropic effective inertial mass.
Hi Greg,
It should be the case that the anisotropic effects are described by the angular momentum. So, mass and angular momentum are the two relevant parameters that you can extract from the energy-momebtum tensor.
It may be more convenient to look at collisions instead of a steady force. It should be the case that you have conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Any anistropic effects should be a consequence of this…
Also, note that the angular momentum contributes to the energy. Therefore, the (invariant) mass of an object depends on its angular momentum.
Iblis: That reminds me, to ask about to what extent the energy of rotation contributes to what we’d otherwise expect (if possible/available) for the masses of various fundamental particles. It is interesting because without a specific classical type mass distribution, we can’t say that the increase is to gamma times the rest value etc. And yet, note that there’s a magnetic field for the electron, which means charge distribution has at least an equivalent “radius” and “velocity.” I wonder if that can be compared, what we get when we pretend the electron is spinning as a shell of classical radius, etc, for any of that. I suppose it could mean something, but I hear little about it.
Greg: I had an article in Physics Essays years ago about the problem of accelerating a mass at the end of a long string. The wild west of extended body dynamics in relativity is one of my favorite avocations, and surprisingly it has been argued and disagreed about for years in journals. Ken Nordtvedt wrote about the equivalent gravitational situation earlier, in AJP. His effect, that a mass suspending pulls less on the holding end than the mg measured locally at the mass, didn’t get the attention it deserved (for example, it never AFAIK appeared in writings as a cute implication of GR, like “You could hold up an elephant in earth-style gravity if you had a long enough cord.”) Maybe one reason is, the increasing magnitude of the hyperbolic gravity field just cancels that “red shift” of weight, so you hold things anyway with the mg using g where your hand is! This confuses the issue and got critic Ø Grøn of Norway all worked up, and in error in my view. That guy sure was a booger for me too later, as referee of my own paper.
In any case, I’m sure you appreciate that stressed bodies in motion have a correction to the usual expressions for mass and momentum. (One illustration: if co-moving observes apply forces simultaneously to a rod seen by us in motion, the rod just sits there for them and no velocity increase for us. However, we see the rear force applied earlier. That puts “extra momentum” (f delta t) and energy (f dot v delta t) into the rod. The lateral shear version really explains the infamous “right-angle lever paradox.” When you apply those corrections to moving bodies, everything is supposed to work out (and per fundamental theorems), but it does make a mess when the stuff is accelerating. I finally got things to work out OK after the paper, where I couldn’t solve it at the time.
In Lederman’s defense, he did say in his book that the reason he chose the title he did is that the publisher wouldn’t let him use “The Goddam Particle.”
Count Iblis, Neil B., thanks for your comments.
Count Iblis, I agree that if you do an experiment in which the incoming state for our system S is completely isolated from the environment, and the outgoing state for S is just a boosted copy of the ingoing state, then an identical force applied to S for an identical time will lead to an identical change in velocity, in whatever direction the force is applied. That follows from conservation of energy-momentum.
Nevertheless, I believe it’s still possible to have anisotropic effects taking place during the interaction. If you imagine, say, a small square of elastic material subject to forces of 100 N and 101 N across the x-direction, and 200 N and 201 N across the y-direction, it will be subject to a net force of 1 N in both directions, but the different average tensions will give rise to small differences in its accelerations in the two directions. Given some complex anisotropic system, all that the conservation laws guarantee is an identical net effect over the course of the whole interaction, not a constant, direction-independent ratio between force and acceleration, holding moment by moment.
That said, everything I’ve read about protons since first raising this question makes it seem unlikely that anyone will be measuring such an effect for a proton any time this century.
Creationism (particularly of the Intelligent Design sort) is impoverishing our language, not religion! Religion was the source of the metaphors you were using in the first place.
And, yeah, I know, I will get hammered, “religion is mostly represented at least publicly by fundamentalists in the US today, yadda yadda yadda.” I get that every time I do this. But I think it very important to emphasize that creationism is not religion. As somebody who’s religious, I want God back, dammit, too! I want to take back religion so that folks like you don’t feel the need to hate it. I’m pissed at the fundamentalists for driving us to that. My way of fighting this is reminding everybody where possible that you don’t have to be a creationist to be religious… and that if you don’t feel the need to stupidly and literally interpret your religious text, perhaps you won’t feel the need to stupidly and literally interpret every metaphor spoken by a scientist.
-Rob
One talks about “Professor Einstein crossing the room” and I do not find it to farfetched to see this as a “intuitive principle” inherent in the term phase transition looking at our early universe.
G -> H -> … -> SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) -> SU(3) x U(1).
Neither would I be to upset that what was illucive in terms of energy particle discriptions in Agasa was the continued struggle to describe what mathematics was approaching in terms of these new higher energy particles.
This was the original, and applying to what remains illucive until actual experimentation is just something we do in descrbing the mystery. We understand the nature of the scientists work here.
Some may have other agendas?
The string landscape then would seem an appropriate and intuitive idea here in terms of the “hills and valleys” and what is “possible” in that early uiverse with regards to tunneling? “Mathematical building” with regards to genus figure calculated.
Physically, the effect can be interpreted as an object moving from the “false vacuum” (where = 0) to the more stable “true vacuum” (where = v). Gravitationally, it is similar to the more familiar case of moving from the hilltop to the valley. IN the case of the Higg’s field the transformation is accompanied with a “phase change“, which endows mass to some of the particles