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

So that's like your electron, or for chrom chromodynamics, it's your clock.

So that's the sort of field we start with.

We then introduce the phase invariance.

Because of the mathematics of how the derivative works, that then necessitates mathematically, there must be an extra field that uh cancels out x that certain terms and that gives rise to the invariance.

And that extra field is our gauge boson field.

But the mathematics of it doesn't determine the physics, it's kind of the other way around.

This was a methodological assumption that was made on the basis of the success of this strategy for quantum electrodynamics, where we already knew the interaction form.

We took a guess and informed guests that something like this would also apply to the weak and the strong forces, and it turns out that it did.

So that's why gauge theory is so important to understanding the standard models, because all of the forces are described using gauge theories, in which we require this local phase invariance, and that then gives rise to exactly the types of interaction forces, coupling between the fermion field and the force mediator field, the gauge field, um, that explains the interactions uh that actually exist physically.

So the mathematics doesn't determine the physics, but we took a guess based on mathematics in one f uh in one force, and it turned out to apply to the other forces as well.

So that's why people sort of say that the local phase invariance gives rise to the the boson.

But I uh yeah, you have to understand the sense in which they mean that.

Now, there are some complexities.

It's not exactly the same as electromagnetism, and so I need to explain those now.

And this is where we get into a little bit of group theory, which I'm by no means an expert on.

I have studied a bit of group theory, but um a group theory is group theory is a mathematical theory that describes certain mathematical objects called groups.

And a group is it's not that complicated if fundamentally a group is a set of mathematical objects which obey certain

Transformation properties.

Objects within the group transform into each other and you can't transform out of the group.

So just to use a very simple example that illustrates the vague idea, if I have, if I start with positive numbers and I multiply them by other positive numbers, I can only get positive numbers.

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