James Fodor

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3,084 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

James Fodor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Science of Everything Podcast · Episode 164: Gauge Theory and the Higgs Boson · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode one hundred and sixty-four, Gauge Theory and the Higgs boson.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this episode picks up directly from where we left off in the previous episode.

where we talked about the different particles in the standard model.

And in that episode we made a distinction between the fermions, which are kind of like matter particles, and the bosons, which are kind of like energy particles in a sense, and that they mediate the fundamental forces that affect the fermions.

So in this episode we're going to talk in more detail about the different gauge bosons and how they work and the mathematical

Behind that, and we're also going to discuss the Higgs boson, which is involved in the origin of mass for the the fermions and the some of the gauge bosons.

So unsurprisingly, recommended pre-listening is episode 163, the standard model, and in turn its uh various prerequisites.

And uh warning in advance, this will be a bit more technical episode, so those prerequisites will be assumed and

And um you bear with me if it if it gets a little technical at times, but I'll do my best to explain it as clearly as I can.

So let's start by talking about the term gauge.

The term gauge refers to any mathematical formalism that's used to regulate redundant degrees of freedom in a physical system.

Essentially what happens when we try to explain or describe a well anything really, but here we're talking about fundamental physics, when we try to describe how they work mathematically, often the mathematics that we use will, either deliberately or inadvertently, introduce extra degrees of freedom that don't correspond to anything physically meaningful.

Let me give a simple example of this.

It's not really a physics example, but hopefully it will illustrate the intuition.

So when people invented numbers, they started with the integers, one, two, three, four, and so forth.

You can add physical objects together and you get higher numbers.

Two plus three is five, right?

And you can have two rocks, bring them together for three rocks, you have five rocks.

We can also imagine taking rocks away.

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