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

uh as it's called, choose the gauge.

Really all it means is that we we have to make a choice about fixing these degrees of freedom, degree or degrees of freedom, so that we can get a specific measurable result out of it.

You have to make a choice.

What we want is a theory where the anything that's observable from the theory, any experimentally testable results, do not depend on the gauge.

Obviously that's the whole point, right?

If if the gauge does not correspond to anything physical

That means that the results shouldn't depend on what gauge we choose.

That should be just some arbitrary choice that we choose for computational convenience.

An analogy to this is choosing our coordinate system.

You may be familiar with Cartesian coordinates versus spherical coordinates or radial coordinates.

They're just different ways of describing three-dimensional space.

They can be useful because they can certain coordinate systems are more convenient for conducting certain types of calculations in.

But the answer

It also shouldn't depend on the coordinate system that you pick, because that's just arbitrary, you can pick whatever you like.

Choice of the gauge is like this.

It's not a coordinate system as such, but it's sort of similar in the idea that it's something that's fixed by the scientists com computing a calculation.

But we want to make sure that the theory is constructed so that the results don't depend on the gauge, because it's just a degree of freedom that you can just sort of pick.

Now, there's something very interesting about this notion of a gauge.

Because you might be wondering, well, if we have internal degrees of freedom in our Lagrangians specifically, um, which means that we have to like choose one in order to get a computational, uh, like an experimentally verifiable number out of it, why don't we just reformulate the theory so that they don't have these internal degrees of freedom and then we don't have to worry about this.

Well, it turns out that it's actually good to keep these internal degrees of freedom in because it makes the calculations much easier and it has there's actually quite a few desirable properties of these.

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