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

prior to spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The B field and the W three field.

Those two combine together using a particular mathematical equation, fairly simple equation, which then gives rise to our electromagnetic field.

And that's that's the same with the W and Z fields as well.

So W plus is formed from the W1 and W2 field, W minus is also formed from the W1 and W2 field.

Z is formed from W3 and B.

And then our electromagnetic field is formed from W3 and B.

So they kind of recombine with each other to form four new fields from four old fields.

Before spontaneous symmetry breaking, we had W1, W2, W3, and B.

And all of them were massless.

After spontaneous symmetry breaking, we had W plus, W minus, and Z, all of which are massive, and then the photon, which is massless.

So the the so the reason why the photon is massless is because it doesn't couple with the Higgs field, whereas the other three did in that transformation process, and so they acquire mass.

This also means that the way I've been talking about gauge symmetries also needs to be modified slightly because there's actually sort of two versions of the gauge symmetry.

There's the gauge symmetries prior to spontaneous symmetry breaking and after spontaneous symmetry breaking.

So prior to spontaneous symmetry breaking, uh we didn't actually have electric charge.

The the color charge is unaffected because that doesn't couple to the Higgs at all.

It doesn't there's no symmetry that's broken.

It's just the weak and and the electromagnetic forces.

So prior to spontaneous symmetry breaking, there was these two other properties called weak isospin and weak hypercharge.

And the um sort of proto weak force, if you like, the the the parts of the gauge invariance that that most closely relate to the the weak force today, so the W one, W two and W three fields, uh they their invariances correspond to conservation of weak isospin.

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