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 · last 12 months

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

But it requires uh it requires a new field, but not just that.

It requires a new field that has a very special property.

And that property is called a non-zero vacuum expectation value.

It's written V E V for short, if you've seen that.

Vacuum expectation value.

What what does that mean and why is it relevant?

A vacuum expectation value is just the value that you expect the field to be, like or that it is on average, um, in a vacuum, so where there are no particles.

You may recall that fermion fields, photon fields, all of the fields, as far as you know, exist like everywhere in space and time, and their value fluctuates, like the fields can be have high or low values depending on what's going on.

If you have a particle that's propagating through free space, it obviously the the field value will be non-zero there.

The expectation will not be zero, but that's because you have a particle that's propagating through there.

If you have empty space with no particles that are moving about there or like no matter that exists there, there there will still be the quantum fields will still be there and they'll still have energy, they'll still be fluctuating, but the expected value will

Yeah.

So this is important to understand.

Expect vacuum expectation value of zero doesn't mean that there's no field there or like that there's nothing happening.

It means there is a field there.

It's fluctuating.

There's like virtual particles, if if you want to think of it that way, or or just fluctuations in the field.

But the expected value of those fluctuations is zero.

So they cancel each other out on average.

That's the key point.

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