You’ve doubtless heard the joke: We can’t call the Higgs boson the “God Particle” any more, because now we have tangible evidence that it exists.
But the label “God Particle,” attached to the poor unsuspecting Higgs boson by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, continues to wreak havoc on physicists’ attempts to clearly explain what is going on. Last week’s announcements from CERN that the new particle discovered last July is looking more and more like the Higgs predicted by the Standard Model generated stories like this one, from CBS news:
The Higgs boson is often called “the God particle” because it’s said to be what caused the “Big Bang” that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists and clergy alike do not care for it) partly because it’s a great explanation of what it’s supposed to do — the Higgs boson is what joins everything and gives it matter.
That might be the worst paragraph I’ve ever read about the Higgs boson, and I’ve read quite a few. (H/t Faye Flam.) Originally I thought the journalist was just making things up, but it turns out that it’s Michio Kaku’s fault. (H/t Matt Strassler on Facebook.) There is a video linked to the article, in which Kaku says that the Higgs helped cause the Big Bang, and that’s why it’s called the God Particle. Another example where it would have been tempting to rag on sloppy popular journalism, where actually it’s a supposed scientist who is largely to blame. (Although the above paragraph is also wrong about things it should be easy to get right.)
For the record, the Higgs had nothing whatsoever to do with causing the Big Bang. (Kaku tries to link it to inflation, but they’re not related.) It also doesn’t “join everything,” whatever that means. It does give mass to elementary particles like electrons and quarks, which isn’t the same as giving “matter” (since that kind of doesn’t make any sense), and besides which it doesn’t give mass to protons and neutrons and therefore most of the mass in ordinary objects.
The “God Particle” label, despite being very catchy and therefore leading to more publicity than most elementary particles manage to muster, has done more harm than good for the public understanding of science. Non-experts, hearing that physicists have named something after God, might actually think they were being serious. Imagine that.
[Update: Matt Strassler adds his take.]
It’s not going away any time soon. Leon Lederman and Chris Hill have a sequel to the original book coming out, Beyond the God Particle, due later this year. I’m sure the book will be great at explaining the physics, and I’m equally sure the title will generate a lot more confusion. Get your disclaimers ready!
For a popular article on where proton mass arises from QCD, let me recommend Wilzcek’s Origin of Mass (pdf)
BTW , Just this comment section of the[ article] is like a particle physics book!,( alot of information to follow up on to learn)
just saved $12 , lol kiddin’
very interesting! thanks yall
jim
Hi vmarko,
you won’t get an ab inito prediction from the Standard Model because the Standard Model isn’t the ab inito description of the universe.
Now praise those computer models more please – it’s kind of heroic given our current ignorance.
And Sean is making a good point, some of of you seem to be saying the bog standard (valence) quarks contribute to the proton mass rather than all the virtual interactions going on – well you really need to explain that a bit more clearly.
I don’t even have the 15 mins to edit my post anymore – edit “ab initio”
Without Higgs the proton would be heavier than neutron (electrostatic energy). However, the scale of their masses O(1 GeV) would be pretty mush the same. Simplest example for the long confusing discussion above: A massless fermion confined in infinite high potential radius R has energy \sim pi/R hence hundreds MeV for R \sim 1fm (that is essence of MIT bag model). Details of how this confinement arises just muddy the waters (at least for the present discussion).
That pedogagic example of how even massless quarks gain total energy, which is manifested as the mc^2 of the whole is the nub. All other discussion about role of gluons, virtual qq* muddy the waters – important for understanding how confinement arises but not essential for this specific issue of why p/n have mass even without Higgs.
Beware of splitting into q and virtual qqbar etc as you run into problems of infinity if not careful (which is all in my book The Infinity Puzzle which also answers some of the confusions that seem widespread and gives a pedagogic explanation of why “infinite” masses, when virtual fields are included, are actually finite – there’s plenty of virtual pairs buried in the H atom for example).
On Monday I am due to be interviewed by M Kaku who started all this debate. Hopefully the level of hype will approach teh spin of the Higgs 🙂
Hi frank
I purchased the original edition of your ‘The Cosmic Onion’ back in the 1980s, really stimulating intro to particle physics for this then teenager.
However, are you claiming that a calculation for proton mass without “muddying the waters” with virtual interactions is possible?
Could someone tell me why Michio Kaku is wrong? Is it because his statement is purely conjecture? Does it have some sort of theoretical basis way out in left field? or is it proven to be untrue and completely unrelated to the big bang?
I’m guessing it’s purely conjecture. Which leaves me asking when did the Higgs field start to do its thing?
I’m not making some snarky comment against Kaku, I really just don’t know much about the Higgs. Was it a slip of the tongue or something more?
Was it a slip of the tongue or something more?
Last night I tried to think of a non-physics claim comparable to Kaku’s statement that “it was a Higgs-like particle that sparked the cosmic explosion. In other words, everything we see around us, including galaxies, stars, planets and us, owes its existence to the Higgs boson.” I came up with: “ketchup comes from cocaine.”
You can start waving your hands about ketchup and cocaine both being derived from plants that evolved in similar regions of the world, but the natural response to this statement is: WTF? This is the response of physicists to Kaku’s claim.
I’m a layman but nonetheless interested in both the Lambda-CDM model and the Higgs mechanism, perhaps Kaku is up to something, there must be reasons and he might explain it later.. best if he could explain along the way about baryonic asymmetry and how gravity gather the outward spray of quark soup 🙂
Beyond the expanding universe there is nothing, not even empty space where time could exist… because as far as mathematics can confidently simulate, the universe space and time and everything in it expanded from 10^-33 meter singularity at 10^-43 second… I think, anything is mathematically possible at that point.
Perhaps Kaku don’t have the data yet that’s why he couldn’t shut up and calculate. He maybe is audacious but with such remarks he raised the interest of the public about science, some did the same raising of interest thing by elaborately displaying the schrodinger equation in a motorway billboard in London. Besides, capitalism dictated that scientists must be strictly on specialization, it’s a good thing Kaku is linking two fields of studies contrary to what capitalism demands. I agree and disagree at the same time with Kaku, this post collapse my wavefunction into agreeing with him, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hit Kaku at other sites 😀
James Gallagher: Frightening how long ago The Cosmic Onion was! My pedagogy was merely to show how a massless fermion, if trapped between infinitely high walls, gains an energy – which is the **model** example of the MIT bag model – and hence the fermion+ the container wall/bubble have a total energy, hence rest mass, without any invocation of Higgs. This is the essence of the MIT bag model. However it is a model; reality is vastly complicated and beyond anyone’s ability to compute (even lattice QCD makes approximations)
Careful! Pretty soon we’ll be seeing the CBS headline: “Physicist’s quote: ‘Ketchup comes from cocaine'”
Frank,
The main issue of the discussion above was whether the main contribution to the proton mass comes from the kinetic energy of quarks inside the proton, or from the potential binding energy. In the language of the bag model, the total mass is computed by adding up the contribution of the kinetic energy of the massless fermion and the potential energy of the walls which confine it. If the walls are infinitely high, the total mass of the system is infinite. If they are finite but high, then they provide confinement only if the kinetic energy of the fermion is smaller than the height of the potential well. Therefore, in the bag model, the contribution of the binding energy to the total mass is always larger than the contribution of the kinetic energy. (N.B. I am glossing over the whole set of issues of the bag model, like the width of the walls, possible tunnel-effect, etc.)
In contrast, Matt and John claimed that the kinetic energy of the valence quarks is the dominant contribution to proton mass, as opposed to the potential binding energy. So either the bag model is a very lousy model of the proton, or else Matt and John are in error.
I guess that is why Sean asked for an explanation of the issue. 🙂
If it is really the potential binding energy the one that gives the dominant contribution, than all the ugly fluff about gluon self-interactions, virtual quark pairs and renormalization *must* be taken into account for the mass calculation, rather than just saying that the quarks in the proton are rotating around each other very fast. There must be a reason why this fast rotation doesn’t break the proton apart, and the reason is that the binding energy should be bigger than the kinetic energy. That was the crux of the discussion (as I understood it). 🙂
And of course, all this has nothing to do with the Higgs, which only gives a (very small) contribution to the total mass by providing the three valence quarks with some nonzero rest mass.
HTH, 🙂
Marko
Don’t know if this will throw a spanner into the works regarding the Higgs Boson. I was playing around with calculations in respect to experimentally measured particle radii and presto discovered a direct simple relationship to their mass!
See my ‘Fundamental Principle of Mass’: http://www.scienceau.com/docs/Fundamental Principle of Mass.pdf
http://www.scienceau.com/docs/Fundamental Principle of Mass.pdf
http://www.scienceau.com/docs/Fundamental_Principle_of_Mass.pdf
Marko
The bottom line is: An infinite wall with three (massless) fermions trapped inside has more energy (about 1 GeV, due to their KE) than one without any.
The question of an infinitely high wall contributing infinity to the energy scale is analogous to Dirac’s infinitely deep sea contributing infinite energy. Its all relative.
@DavidGold,
I’m not seeing any spanner being thrown. Red flag #1: You’re predicting a massive photon. Red flag #2: You lump together “photon, neutrino, and gluon” and invent a “calculated radius” and “volume” for them without any justification.
It’s easy for me to comprehend that 99% of the proton’s mass came from kinetic energy of the particles within the proton.. angular momenta I assume, which confused me. What happens to the opposite angular momenta of the valence quarks and other particles, do it simply cancel? or converted to thermal right away and supposed to incinerate the proton but didn’t.
actually, according to a 2008 Guardian interview, Higgs argues that LL had intended to call the particle the “Goddamm Particle”, which obviously the ed didnt go for, maybe they should have.
Lederman did not gave the higgs boson its now popular soubriquet, he just didn’t argue much with his editor. He prefers to call the higgs boson as the goddamn particle because in spite of the huge expenditures nobody could find the goddamn particle at that time… huge expenditures is also known as the multi-billion euro Large Hadron Collider.
What’s in a name anyway? a higgs boson by any other name is just as complicated… tiny ball of wave in a quantum field.
whats in a name ? quite a bit indeed…because of the God qualifier thousands have one to hell….
I didn’t noticed hell in the higgs field, only its non-zero average value.
Even tho it is important for humans to search and learn all they can, we will never, and I mean never find out everything that God has put together for us and the vast universe. There are things that are certainly not for us to know. And I wonder about people that think that there is no God. If they can believe that everything came from nothing, then why not a God?