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Originally Posted by neutralino  I stumbled upon a nice article about the Higgs particle recently. Apparently, in 1993, the UK science minister issued a challenge to physicists to describe the Higgs boson and why we want to find it on one piece of paper. Here is a list of the winners: I especially liked this article, written by Tom Kibble, which seems to explain the problem, and what the Higgs is, in a rather simple way! |
Hi Neutralino and Pat
This article, like the others submitted in response to the Minister's request, simply tell us why we need a mechanism to explain what mass is - and the current vogue is for a particle which is called the Higgs Boson after Peter Higgs who suggested it. None of the responses made any attempt to describe what the HB looks like or how it works. This explanation is simply saying that there's something out there which is responsible for mass and as we don't know what it is we'll conjure up a new particle. This approach relies heavily on the success of past predictions in the derrivation of the standard model and on an assumption that forces are the result of the transfer of particles (bosons).
Science is now placing a lot of faith in the LHC and its ability (by using higher energy collisions) to detect both the HB and the graviton. My feeling is that it will detect neither as they are not 'particles' in the accepted sense. There is an underlying mechanism, which is the source of matter (probably in the form of various combinations of string) and this will not therefore exhibit itself in our reality. If my interpretation is right then the HB cannot be detected by using particle collisions as it is not, in itself, ordinary matter.
A similar argument is put forward for the existence of the graviton. As gravity exists then there must be a mediator and current thinking proposes it to be another particle. Think what this would actually require - particles flowing back and forth between every massive particle in the universe and also moving through eachother. If we consider gravity to be an effect (as described in GR) then it does not require the graviton to be a particle. Rather there has to be a mechanism, which incorporates the HB and the graviton in such a way as to describe the effects of mass and gravity. If background dependency is accepted then they simply become part of the underlying 'aether' (or 'the fabric space/time' if you are allergic to the word). The HB is the source of matter and the graviton is the linking mechanism which holds the HBs together/apart in a grid structure. Mass is then simply the vibration of these links and its magnitude is dependent on the amplitude of the vibration.
If someone tells me how to get my diagrams (currently in M/S Word) onto this site then I can illustrate the above which all relates back to wave particle duality.
all the best
Felix