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 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

The other particles have mass because of a coupling with other degrees of freedom of the Higgs field, and specifically the fact that the Higgs field has a non-zero vacuum expectation value.

That doesn't directly have anything to do with the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is kind of a residual leftover of that Higgs field.

It's still important because it needs to exist for the theory to be correct, uh, to have the right numbers of degrees of freedom, for example.

Uh and so i the existence of this Higgs boson was predicted way back in the 1960s or 1970s, and at the time we didn't have the particle accelerators needed to generate it, uh, because it's quite short-lived and needs high energies to produce one.

And so it took until 2012 for that to happen.

Uh but it was predicted many decades before and was final sort of

Proof that the standard model was indeed correct, that this was able to be predicted.

But the Higgs boson itself does not generate mass.

It's part of the process by which mass is generated through the Higgs mechanism and the non-zero vacuum expectation value.

That also means, by the way, that prior to the spontaneous symmetry breaking, so fractions of a second after the Big Bang, before the Higgs field acquired non-zero vacuum expectation value, all of the particles

particles were massless, not just the gauge bosons, but all of the fermions as well, and the Higgs field, the Higgs field itself was also massless.

So there was no mass prior to the spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Alright, so now we have resolved this conundrum of how we can account for massive gauge bosons, in the case of the weak nuclear force, whilst retaining gauge symmetry, we introduce this Higgs mechanism, which has this special property of the non-zero vacuum expectation value, which when coupling with a uh a gauge boson allows us to generate a mass term.

And in turn, we can get that non-zero vacuum expectation value as a result of this spontaneous symmetry breaking when we introduce this special quartic potential of the Higgs field into our Lebrangian.

And so all of the rest then follows from this sort of single, very simple alteration.

And again, so this was a hypothesis when this intro was introduced.

It was a way to resolve the problem, but it wasn't guaranteed to be true.

It was a hypothesis which then led to this prediction, which was subsequently verified when we discovered.

the Higgs boson.

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