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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is the Higgs field named incorrectly?
« on: 23/08/2017 19:31:16 »If you hark back to the days before Michelson, Morley, and Einstein, you'll find the "aether," a hypothetical substance which supported the propagation of e/m waves. The aether was thought to be a substance pervading all space with equal density and consistency. The aether was thought to be a property of space itself, otherwise its consistency could not make sense and light-speed would fluctuate in a detectable manner.
I'll answer the aether part of the discussion with the following (and it also helps visualize fields):
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Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University, had this to say about ether in contemporary theoretical physics:
It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
The Higgs Field is one of many fields that permeate all of space. Because of the symmetries of Relativity you can't ascribe a rest frame (a rest velocity) to the fields but they can contain non-zero levels of energy existing as vacuum fluctuations (indirectly observed in experiments on the Casimir Effect and many other experiments). If an excitation is at just the right energy it can exist in a stable (or semi-stable form if they can easily decay into daughter particles like the heavier Higgs Boson easily does) quantized form we call a particle. If a fluctuation has a little too much or too little energy it can only exist for a very brief duration of time due to the Uncertainty Principle. Many fluctuations exist far off their energy/mass shell and exist as virtual particles we can't directly detect.
Different fields can interact with one another and ALL particles have an associated field. Particles are quantized excitations of their associated field. Perhaps as some theories suggest all these fields are just different modes of the same underlying field (different ways a single unified field vibrates). The Higgs Mechanism takes a field like the electron field where the electron should move at light speed and interacts with it. This interaction slows the excitations of the electron field down turning some of the electron's energy into rest energy (mass). The analogy is like a rock star getting slowed down while moving through their crowd of fans. This allows the electron to have a speed other than light speed. If the Higgs Mechanism didn't exist most likely all particles would move at the speed of light.
Charged particles like electrons and protons interact with the electromagnetic field (also called the photon field) but the photon is the excitation of that particular field. The magnetic and electric fields are different aspects of the same field. Other force causing fields like gravity also have relativistic magnetic analogs (frame dragging ect) so the magnetic field is just an aspect of the fully relativistic electromagnetic field.