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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

The muon and the muon neutrino form a weak doublet, likewise the tau and the tau neutrino.

And as for the quarks, well same thing there.

The up and the down quark form a weak doublet.

Same with the charm and the strange, same with the top and the bottom quark.

So there's actually a a more specific logic to why we group like the quarks and the leptons together, particularly the leptons, is that they form a weak doublet.

And that means that they transform and interact in certain ways in the Lagrangian, so that we have to kind of write them together.

And this means that when we when we write the Lagrangian, we end up with even more redundant degrees of freedom.

Remember the redundant degrees of freedom in the electromagnetic case came from the fact that when we have two uh uh two electron fields, we can only measure the phase difference between them, but mathematically each has its own phase that's in the equation.

So there's an extra term there.

But in the case of the weak nuclear force, we we actually have kind of four fields.

that um multiply together or kind of interact with each other, right?

That that's the in the lepton case, that's like your electron and your electron neutrino.

And then there's there's two of those, there's two weak doublets that appear in the in the form of the Lagrangian.

So instead of giving rise to one redundant degree of freedom, now we have three redundant degrees of freedoms.

Technically what this refers to is the um

Rotation of the phase between the the spaces of the electron versus the electron neutrino.

There's a there's not just a phase shift but now a phase rotation because there's multiple dimensions.

Don't worry too much if that's a little confusing.

Just understand that because there's a weak doublet that appears in the field uh in the equations, not just not just one field, but uh a doublet, we now have more kind of mathematical interactions and that gives rise to more redundant degrees of freedom.

So we now have three

Showing 301–320 of 3,084 · page 16 of 155