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

Every field that we've talked about so far.

Apart from the Higgs field, but before the Higgs field, all of the gauge bosons and the fermions, they all of those fields have a vacuum expectation value of zero.

But it turns out that if you introduce a new field that has a non-zero vacuum expectation value, then you can get some very interesting results in in your Lagrangian.

And it turns out that if you couple if you couple a field with a non-zero vacuum expectation value with, say, a massless gauge field, and you rearrange the terms in the Lagrangian, you actually get your gauge field to have mass.

You you get this mass term for the gauge field.

So that the mass

the mass less gauge field, when it couples with the Higgs field,

turns into a massive gauge field, which is exactly what we want to happen.

And it turns out you can do that while preserving gauge invariance.

And the reason that this is possible is sort of fairly simple mathematically.

It's just because the problem is normally if you interact fields well with other fields, you you get interaction terms.

You don't get a mass term.

Why is it different here?

It's because of this non-zero vacuum expectation value.

The non-zero vacuum expectation value is a constant.

It's not a field term.

It's just like it's just like a number.

And so when we interact that number with another field, you actually get a mass term.

You you don't get an interaction term.

So th so that's really cool.

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