Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: David Taylor on 27/11/2011 23:30:02
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David Taylor asked the Naked Scientists:
Hi Chris,
I discovered your podcast a couple of months ago and I've been working my way through all of them, they're really interesting.
I have a question...
I've been reading about the LHC and the search for the Higgs particle
recently.
I read that not only would the Higgs Boson have mass but that
it would give it's self mass.
If it has mass does that mean that it is in it's self a form of
matter? (defining matter as anything that has mass and occupies
volume).
So would an individual Higgs Boson particle give itself mass or would it acquire
mass through interacting with other particles in the Higgs Field?
I'm having trouble getting my head around the idea that something that
creates mass can create mass for itself.
Thanks, keep up the good work!
David
What do you think?
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Ouch :)
A boson giving itself mass? Depends on what you think really, really, really reallly, exist, doesn't it? Behind it all so to speak.
Any idea like that has to rest on believing in 'hidden variables' defining the universe, as I see it. That it somewhere, somehow makes sense, and that there is hidden causality chains explaining the duality between waves and 'particles'. That one goes back to how we grow up, we live in a world where we constantly see causality chains, and expect 'reality' to be able to be defined through them. And to see it otherwise is a recent development, defined in chaos theory, 'probabilities' etc. Most of it coming from Quantum Physics.
Maybe you can have it both ways though, meaning that what we see as 'causality chains' also have a 'duality', in another way just being defined by its relations to everything else, having a influence on it as it has on them. Like as if the ripple you see in the pond, at the same time as it is defined by the stone you threw, also is a function of you throwing it as well as everything else influencing or enabling this ripple you see.
And that's my view.
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This is really important! I have just answered a question related to time and clock paradoxes where bad teaching is causing genuinely investigative people to generate poor ideas because they have not been taught properly the most fundamental facts about our universe. Maybe if the textbooks were corrected and the teachers taught properly this would be reduced and these people would be able to have really useful ideas.
The first and most fundamental thing about our universe is that it is made out of energy and momentum nothing else. Everything else including most of the most familiar reference points are emergent properties of energy and momentum. Notably: space, time and mass. All of these are the end products of how energy and momentum have interacted and been localised to create "particles" and "waves" that interact to produce space time mass and everything else that we experience and can observe and experiment with.
Once one realises this most of the paradoxes iron them selves out.
The quantum mechanical vacuum (empty space) consists of every possibility of virtual particles that can exist within the limits set by the uncertainty principle this says that energy and time and momentum and space are linked via Planck's constant and within these confines everything that can, will happen.
If (and only if) the interaction of a particle with the virtual Higgs particles in the quantum mechanical vacuum creates the observed mass of all massive particles it is perfectly logical that the mass of the Higgs particle itself would be created by its own interaction with these virtual Higgs particles.