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

For every other field, the lowest energy state is where the expected value of the field is zero.

That's our parabola, right?

What I'm saying is that for the Higgs field, the lowest energy state is actually not where the field is zero on error.

average where not where the field has an expectation value of zero.

It's actually where the field has a positive expected value.

And that's what is the non-zero VEV, the non-zero vacuum expectation value.

It's because it arises because of this weird potential shape.

So what happens is that the expected value of the field is positive because that's where it's at l its lowest energy, just because of the value of the shape of the potential.

This this arises initially because of something called spontaneous symmetry breaking.

When the universe was very hot and very young, you know, fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the Higgs field was in, it did have a vacuum expectation value of zero.

It was in that sort of central point of zero field, zero potential.

But then but what happened is very soon afterwards the symmetry broke and the field adopted a positive value.

It was sort of randomly flattened.

Fluctuated out.

So now it has a positive value in expectation, which means that it has a lower potential than it used to.

It went from a zero potential to like a negative potential.

So the potential went down by the field becoming positive.

So this is only possible because of the special quartic shape.

The normal quadratic shape doesn't allow for this.

So most fields this won't happen for.

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