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

As long as we have a way to get rid of them in the end, then it's fine.

It doesn't matter if they're there during the calculation.

Kind of like negative numbers.

It's good to have negative numbers during the calculations.

It's just that as long as we don't then try to say that there's a negative rock that exists in the real world, that doesn't really make sense.

Um likewise, having the internal degrees of freedom in

The Lagrangian is fine as long as we have a way to ensure that they don't affect the final uh experimentally uh verifiable results, right?

And there's an interesting property of these uh of these internal degrees of freedom that correspond to this gauge choice, that whenever there is a redundant degree of freedom in a Lagrangian,

there will always be a corresponding symmetry of that theory.

Where the theory gives the same answers

even after you transform all of the terms in a certain way.

This is called a gauge transform, which gives rise to a certain type of symmetry.

Let me give an example to make this a bit more concrete.

So when physicists were developing a theory of um quantum electrodynamics, so electromagnetism but quantized.

They realized that the the way we describe the photon field, the electromagnetic field, I'll just call it the photon field for short, is we use uh complex numbers, right?

So that's when you have a real and an imaginary component.

Complex numbers are a very convenient way of describing the f the phase of a field, which essentially is like where you are on the oscillation scale from like uh peaks to troughs.

The position sort of relative to to one cycle is is your phase.

So we have those numbers in the in the theory, in the Lagrangian, as um uh as terms describing the phase of a given uh electromagnetic field.

But what they discovered is that to get an experimentally verifiable result, y you always multiply multiple fields together.

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