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

So that's very nice.

But there's still a problem.

And those of you familiar with this may have noticed that there's something that I've skipped over.

And again, I did that deliberately because you can't you can't introduce everything at once.

Uh i it's it's an important but in some ways minor detail, um but it does need to be explained.

And this relates to the

unification of the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear force together into the electroweak force.

When this theory of the Higgs mechanism was being developed in order to resolve this problem with the the weak bosons having mass and and reconciling that with the gauge invariance,

The way I initially described it, in terms of like you have your massless gauge bosons, then they acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs mechanism, whereas the photon doesn't interact with the Higgs field, so it doesn't get a mass.

It turns out that that doesn't work.

In fact, prior to the Higgs field gaining its non-zero vacuum expectation value, prior to the spontaneous symmetry breaking,

We didn't even have W bosons or Z bosons or photon at all.

We had something different.

The terms that are used for this is is W1, W2, W3, and B.

The way you can think about this is like W1, W2, and W3 are kind of like our proto W and Z bosons, whereas B is like our proto-photon.

They're not they're not the same, but they're kind of related to the fields that we now have.

But I'll explain the way they're related.

Basically they're related by a transformation.

So for example, let's take our photon, our electromagnetic field.

The electromagnetic field that we currently have and it exists in the universe is actually formed by a combination of two of the fields that previously existed.

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