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

We've talked about that before.

I'm not going to go over that in detail here.

A gauge transformation in this case is when we take our fermion field.

So think of this as just like your electron field for simplicity, but you could do this for other fields too.

You take your electron field.

And you transform it mathematically using a particular rule.

Basically, you just shift the phase.

If I shift the phase of the field everywhere,

in space and time, because remember these theories describe space and time like four dimensionally.

If you shift the field everywhere in space and time by a certain amount, then that doesn't change the results.

That makes sense intuitively, right?

We can't measure the absolute phase, only phase differences.

So if you shift all the phases by the same amount, then there's not going to be any difference in the results.

So this extra degree of freedom

in the Lagrangian gives rise to a gauge symmetry.

which is the symmetry produced by shifting everything over the all of the phases over by a certain amount.

That's a global symmetry.

And it corresponds to a something that uh uh is physically conserved, which is conservation of charge.

So the symmetry, the global symmetry of shifting the phase of the photo uh of the electromagnetic field corresponds to, or is a way of describing, the fact that electric charge is conserved in interactions involving electromagnetism.

So that's pretty cool.

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