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.

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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

Those transformations are described by these symmetry groups, which then gives rise to a certain number of gauge bosons, the same number as the number of generators in the in the group, right?

So that's what I mean by um this gauge invariance here.

But for a while no one could figure out a way of doing this.

Until they did.

And that's what I'm going to now talk about.

This is where we introduce the Higgs boson.

Or really more generally the Higgs mechanism.

The Higgs boson is sort of a part of that.

So uh this was uh very important work and s kind of the most important work that's happened t to finish out the standard model really, and was largely developed in the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies.

Uh this relates to the Higgs mechanism and the the Higgs mechanism and associated electroweak force, the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces.

So what's all this about?

Let let's introduce the players here.

I did say earlier that there was another type of boson, the Higgs boson, which is not a gauge boson.

The Higgs boson is actually just a part of this picture, and so we we need to take a step back and talk about the Higgs field, which is a new field that's introduced uh in order to um resolve this conundrum of how to describe massive W and Z bosons whilst retaining gauge invariants.

That's

That's the puzzle.

And the answer is you can do that by introducing the Higgs field.

But it's going to take a little bit of explanation to explain what this is and and how it does that.

So the Hicks field is a new field.

Uh it has a spin zero, which is interesting.

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