James Fodor

speaker

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 · last 12 months

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

So this was all discovered initially in the context of quantum electrodynamics, where we already knew the form of the Lagrangian, including the interaction terms between electrons and photons.

So we already had that in the Lagrangian.

It just turned out that there was this undesirable property that the results depended on the gauge.

So in order to make that not the case, the results invariant to gauge, we we we figured we could do that by introducing this local phase invariance.

And then we we get this nice relationship between the gauge field.

field and the um local transformation.

This might not be that interesting if it was just quantum electrodynamics, because we already knew what the Lagrangian should look like.

But it becomes much more interesting and much more important when we come to the weak and strong nuclear forces.

Because when we were trying to develop

uh quantum field theories of these forces, we didn't have a classical analog.

There is no Maxwell's equations for the strong or weak nuclear forces.

We didn't have anything to go by.

We did so that means we didn't know what the interaction forms should look like in the Lagrangian.

We had to figure it out.

So, you know, there's different ways of doing that and people try different methods, but the technique that turned out to be very successful is taking the logic that was developed in quantum electrodynamics and reversing it.

Remember in quantum electrodynamics, we started with the Lagrangian, which we inferred from the equations of Maxwell's equations of motion.

And then from that, we we got the Lagrangian, and then we we saw in the Lagrangian that there was this extra degree of freedom corresponding to phase, uh, which gave rise to this dependence of our calculations on this internal degree of freedom, which was not measurable.

It depends on the gauge that we chose.

That was not desirable.

And so then we worked out that we could get.

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