Because of the simple interaction between the S and Z fields with strength y, a non-zero equilibrium value S0 for the S field gives the Z quantum a mass proportional both to y and to S0.
The S field’s non-zero value has given mass to the particle of the Z field!
Basically particles are quanta of a field away from its equilibrium value. The nonzero equilibrium value of the Higgs field gives particles in other fields their masses, due to the coupling of the fields, if I read this right (I'm sure I didn't).
I wish he would have mentioned if the Z field is related to the Z boson:
The Z’s don’t hang around very long. Being so heavy, they decay into all kinds of things: quarks, muons, neutrini, you name it! Like the W’s, they appear for something like 3x10^-25 seconds before decaying. A photon can’t even get across a proton that quickly.
Unfortunately naming collisions are frequent in physics, and I don't have time to dive into it and assign the two Z into proper namespaces. Also there's no way to understand part of this without understanding all of it, similarly to how often there's no way to use one service in AWS without understanding many unrelated services like IAM, because of its use of 20th century metaphors like identity/access control by source address instead of doing it "the web way" by granting access via a key. The web way allows us to step up to a higher level of abstraction and not get mired in minutia.
Why I worry about this is because the gluon in the strong force is self-interacting:
Which suggests to me that it's actually two or more things that are each not self-interacting. But the noncontextual terminology and thick notation of particle physics leads one to stop at the notion of a gluon and not question its oddities, or never arrive at understanding it in the first place. So here we get distracted by trying to remember names rather than coming up with better models for what happens in the span of light crossing a proton, which we can't see anyway.
I just feel more and more that bigger accelerators aren't going to solve this stuff, because the real problem is that only a few dozen scientists in the world actually understand quantum mechanics. Its sort of like how tensors are hard to reason about, and maybe it's worth scrapping them and going back to matrices holding various types because that's more approachable for humans. I would compare the problem to how the use of single letters for variable names made C code in the 1990s harder to read than Javascript today. I wish we had the time, money and resources to refactor physics so that more people could be involved with brainstorming. Short of that, I'm hopeful that AI will summarize this stuff so that we can work with it more like, I dunno, geometry.
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
Basically particles are quanta of a field away from its equilibrium value. The nonzero equilibrium value of the Higgs field gives particles in other fields their masses, due to the coupling of the fields, if I read this right (I'm sure I didn't).I wish he would have mentioned if the Z field is related to the Z boson:
https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/z-b...
Unfortunately naming collisions are frequent in physics, and I don't have time to dive into it and assign the two Z into proper namespaces. Also there's no way to understand part of this without understanding all of it, similarly to how often there's no way to use one service in AWS without understanding many unrelated services like IAM, because of its use of 20th century metaphors like identity/access control by source address instead of doing it "the web way" by granting access via a key. The web way allows us to step up to a higher level of abstraction and not get mired in minutia.Why I worry about this is because the gluon in the strong force is self-interacting:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-finall...
Which suggests to me that it's actually two or more things that are each not self-interacting. But the noncontextual terminology and thick notation of particle physics leads one to stop at the notion of a gluon and not question its oddities, or never arrive at understanding it in the first place. So here we get distracted by trying to remember names rather than coming up with better models for what happens in the span of light crossing a proton, which we can't see anyway.
I just feel more and more that bigger accelerators aren't going to solve this stuff, because the real problem is that only a few dozen scientists in the world actually understand quantum mechanics. Its sort of like how tensors are hard to reason about, and maybe it's worth scrapping them and going back to matrices holding various types because that's more approachable for humans. I would compare the problem to how the use of single letters for variable names made C code in the 1990s harder to read than Javascript today. I wish we had the time, money and resources to refactor physics so that more people could be involved with brainstorming. Short of that, I'm hopeful that AI will summarize this stuff so that we can work with it more like, I dunno, geometry.