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

That the gauge formalism works very well for the strong nuclear force, no problems there, but when you apply it to the weak nuclear force, it turns out, and I won't try to describe the mathematics behind this, but it turns out that gauge theory can only describe massless gauge bosons.

That's fine for the electromagnetic force because the photon is massless.

And it's fine for the strong nuclear force because gluons are massless, all eight of them.

But for the weak nuclear force, it was known that the W and Z bosons would have to be massive.

They hadn't actually been discovered at the time, but it was known from various i

inferential means from other experimentals laws that they would they had uh substantial mass.

And that's a problem because try as they might, they could not figure out any way to get this gauge formalism to work with massive gauge bosons.

That because of the properties required by these gauge fields to like

couple with the fermion field in the right way and to be uh consistent with this invariance of the phase and so forth, they have to be massless.

The mass terms if you you can write the mass terms in the Lagrangian, you can add them there, which they tried to do, uh, but it turns out that the resulting theories are unrenormalizable, which means they they give um

implausible infinities w when you try to compute um experimentally observable results from them, like the cross sections or the decay rates.

And so the theories don't really work.

So this gave rise to a problem.

We needed to have way some way of describing the mass of W and Z bosons.

But without giving up gauge invariance.

Because gauge invariance was so successful and it was critical to describe the interactions of all of the theories.

And giving up gauge, they tried giving up gauge invariance and that made them unrenormalizable.

So it seemed like that the right theory should be gauge invariant.

Should have these.

Internal degrees of freedom cancelled out by these uh requiring these invariance of the of the fermion fields to certain types of phase transformations.

Showing 421–440 of 3,084 · page 22 of 155