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

It's only the special properties of the potential associated with the Heaks field that allow the spontaneous.

asymmetry breaking to happen, which gives us our non-zero vacuum expectation value, which then when we couple the Higgs field to our gauge bosons, causes those gauge bosons to acquire mass.

Now you may recall I said earlier that the Higgs field initially, before spontaneous symmetry breaking, had four degrees of freedom.

After spontaneous symmetry breaking, three of those degrees of freedom kind of combine in mathematically, they sort of mix up together and combine with the three gauge bosons for the weak nucleophores, so the W plus, W minus, and Z bosons, and give each of those uh particles mass.

Now it turns out that a

Vector boson, which has zero mass, has two degrees of freedom.

So like photon, each of the gluons, they have two degrees of freedom.

A massive one has three degrees of freedom.

So each of those uh weak force gauge bosons acquired an extra degree of freedom from the Higgs field, which then lost that degree of freedom after the spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The way that you'll sometimes see this described is that after spontaneous symmetry breaking, when the Higgs field acquires a non-zero vacuum expectation value, this generates three different goldstone bosons, which are then eaten by the gauge bosons of the weak nuclear force, causing them to have mass.

That phrase of eaten is a bit confusing.

I don't really know where that comes from, but it's just effectively what's happening is that we are introducing.

A new potential term into Lagran Lagrangian, which results in rearranging and mathematical redefining of things to remove extra degrees of freedom essentially.

After that all plays out, what happens is we now have three gauge bosons that are massive instead of three massless ones.

And that's where those degrees of freedoms went.

But if you see this language of like eating the goldstone bosons and giving mass, that's what that's referring to.

It's it's a

Yeah.

You may wonder what about the other gauge bosons?

What about our gluons and our photon?

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