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

And just like we had the conservation laws um for the weak and the electromagnetic force, likewise that the global conservation law that relates to the invariance of the phase of the charge uh part of the equation, the colour charge, uh gives rise to conservation of charge.

So we have conservation of weak flavor, conservation of electromagnetic charge, and then conservation of color charge, each of the three forces.

That's gauge theory and how it relates to the standard model.

Each of the three forces has its own gauge group that describes the

Extra degrees of freedom we have in our Lagrangian.

It turns out mathematically that we can generate the form of the interaction between the fermions and the um the gauge fields by requiring this local phase invariance by by shifting the phase of our fermions at each point in space.

And that will then essentially remove the extra degrees of freedom at the expense of, or remove the degrees of freedom, by introducing this extra field, the gauge field, that then determines the form of our interaction potential.

So essentially requiring gauge invariants in this way is a nice way to get the form of the interactions to be the way that it should be, or the way that it's the way that experimentally we've found that the interactions are.

Again, as far as I know, there's no deep reason as to why this is the way that nature works, but it just kind of is.

And so this gauge theory formalism has been very successful.

And that's why the standard model is often described in terms of these groups and

the symmetries that they describe because it's a very convenient mathematical formalism that relates directly to the number of gauge bosons and the conserved property that they mediate.

So at this point we understand the four different forces, well three that we're talking about here, and we understand the difference between fermions and bosons, and we understand how the bosons mediate interactions of a particular type of force between the fermions, and how gauge theory allows us to describe that in a very eloquent, eloquent mathematical formalism.

Um, and that gives rise to this term of like gauge um invariance and gauge bosons and uh and so forth.

But

There's a big butt.

It turns out

That this doesn't work.

Or specifically, it doesn't work for the weak nuclear force.

This was discovered in the 1960s.

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