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 differentiates it from the other gauge bosons, which will have a spin of one, as well as the fermions, which have a half integer spin.

So the Higgs field uh has a spin of zero and it has four components initially.

So how does this Higgs field solve our problem of uh describing how W and Z bosons get their mass whilst retaining the Gauge invariance?

Well, to understand that, let's let's take a few steps back and talk about what mass actually is in quantum electrodynamics.

Mass is just another type of energy that goes into the Lagrangian.

I said before, we have our kinetic energy terms that have derivatives, and then we have our interaction energy terms, which involve like multiplying our gauge fields with our fermion fields.

And though the form of that is given by the requirement of this gauge invariance.

variance right that interaction terms then directly fall out of that.

So we have our kinetic terms, our interaction terms.

There's separate kinetic terms for the fermions as well as the gauge bosons.

And there's also mass terms.

So for a particle to be massive it needs to have the right kind of energy term in its Lagrangian.

Specifically that just consists a constant and then two fields multiplied together like two electron fields multiplied together and then a constant in front of that.

The constant is the mass.

That's a very

simple term, but you need that specific form of t of term that exists in the Lagrangian in order for a particle to be massive.

And the point was that if you just write those terms into the Lagrangian for the um WMZ bosons, then they have a mass term, but it turns out the theory is unrenormalizable.

So that didn't work.

So physicists tried to work out how can we get this ma these mass terms to exist for the W and Z bosons uh without breaking gauge invariance.

Well, it turns out that there is a way to do this, that there's sort of a sneaky way that you can get a mass term that would not necessarily, uh if you, you know, arrange it correctly, would not necessarily involve breaking gauge invariance.

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