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

You can never get a negative number by multiplying a positive number by another positive number.

But if I start with negative numbers and multiply them by negative numbers, I can get positive numbers.

If I'm multiplying by negative numbers, I can get positive or negative numbers.

Whereas if I'm multiplying only by positive numbers, I can only get positive numbers.

So these would be kind of like two different groups that are closed under different operations of like multiplying by a positive versus a negative number.

So there's different sets of numbers in this case that you get depending on

What operation you're talking about?

Groups don't have to be comprised just of numbers, I said mathematical objects, they can be comprised of kind of anything, including other sets, or, in the case that would be relevant here, matrices.

Okay, so why are we talking about all this group theory?

And don't worry too much if you don't get the mathematics, because it's not that important to understand the mathematics.

Uh it's just important to understand some of the terminology.

It is said that the standard model consists of three gauge groups, or like a gauge structure of the standard model, called SU3, SU2, and U1.

And you'll often see it written as like the product of these.

So SU3 times SU2 times U1.

These terms here are referring to the types of groups that that correspond to each of the gauge symmetries.

This is all uh will be confusing, but hopefully it'll become a little bit clearer as I pass some of this terminology for you.

So let's start with the simplest case, which is electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism only has a single field, a single gauge field, it's the photon.

As such, there's only a single extra degree of freedom in the theory.

That's the phase of the fermion phase.

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