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

It's basically this trick of introducing a special type of uh uh a field with a special type of property that allows us to get our mass term for well, for any particle actually, not just a gauge boson.

So just to summarize that, normally what would happen if we just introduced a new field and interacted it with the field that we wanted to become massive, it would just make new interaction terms.

It wouldn't give us any mass terms.

However, if that field has a non-zero vacuum expectation value, that basically introduces a constant term, which then when we interact it with our other field, gives a mass term for that new field.

So this is sort of like a special type of interaction, which instead of giving an interaction term, it gives you a mass term.

Which is very cool.

Not something we've seen before in the in the standard model.

And it it's dependent on this special property of a non-zero vacuum expectation value.

But a non-zero vacuum expectation value is a pretty weird property to have.

What that means is that even in empty space where there's no particles, the field still has a positive value, a positive expected value, not just fluctuating values.

That's every field has that, but it has a expected value that is positive.

So a kind of like there's sort of extra energy there would be sort of one way of thinking about this.

That's weird, uh, but it's there's nothing inconsistent about that or impossible about that as far as we know.

So the pot the hypothesis was, well, there there must be this extra field out there.

They called it the Higgs field after one of the scientists who worked on this.

Actually, in fact, there are many, and you can see longer versions of the name that have many hyphenations.

I'm just gonna call it the Higgs field.

Um, but if we introduce this Higgs field, which has this non-zero vacuum expectation value, then we can get

Get our gauge bosons to become massive while preserving gauge invariance, and that fixes all of the problems that we had with the uh the weak nuclear force.

But of course, that comes at the expense of a new problem.

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