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

that they have similar properties otherwise.

And uh for example, they don't carry an electric charge.

So there's not like a W plus and a W minus version.

They're also all massless, so there's no difference in mass.

And then maybe that's why they're written differently, because W and Z bosons have mass and their difference mass.

They also have different charges, so they're written separately.

But the gluons all have the same mass, zero, and the same charge, zero.

And so they're sort of written together.

But for for in terms of understanding the symmetries of the gauge theory, you should really think of there being eight different gluons.

And basically these eight gluons correspond to eight different ways of

combining or like transferring charge uh between uh between quarks or between other gluons.

So this means that each of these eight different types of gluons is kind of comprised of different combinations of color charge.

So, for example, one of the eight gluons is red anti blue plus blue anti red.

And they essentially correspond to all of the different ways you can transfer.

If you think of like mathematical transformations, what we're doing is rotating within this three dimensional space of charge phases.

Um each of the um each of the color charge fields has its a phase associated with it, just like every other field, but only phase differences are observable.

So we've got all of

these extra degrees of freedom.

We need it to be invariant between any of these rotations in this in this space.

And so it turns out that that gives rise to eight degrees of freedom that can be described with the eight different gluons that have these different combinations of these color charges within them.

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