Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge wonder: if the Higgs gives mass to the other particles, how does it get mass itself?
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I have a really deep question for you, or one that's really been puzzling me.
Oh, but we're jumping right into the heart stuff. Huh.
I don't know. Maybe you're gonna think it's easy.
Really a cartoon is let's find out.
So we just came off of the holiday season, lots of people, got lots of presents. Yeah, yeah, And in American Christmas, at least, the traditional story is that Santa Claus brings all those kids' presence.
Hmmm.
You're not gonna ask me about the physics of flying reindeer, are you?
No? No, No, My question is more philosophical. It's does Santa also get presents? Who is Santa's Santa?
WHOA that's meta, dude.
And if Santa has a Santa, who is their Santa? Santa Santa Santa.
Santa has a Grand Santa and a great grand Sentent. But you know, I don't think you want to go too far into the Santa verse here. Just accept your presence, Daniel.
Thanks Santa, I hope these cookies are enough for you.
Hi am more handmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I have sometimes played Santa.
Oh really in like a theater production in the movie.
No No, in the Eating Cookies Late at Night version of Santa.
I see you don't even leave presents. You just go and eat the cookies. You try to teach your kids a valuable lesson about leaving food out.
We're all about delegation. My wife handles the presents, I handle the cookies. You know, it's a.
Marriage that seems like a raw deal for one of you, or a half big deal, depending on the cookies. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we share the treats of the universe with you. We don't gobble up all the cookies of understanding. We break them into pieces and pass them around to all of humanity. We think it's important that everybody gets to taste the sweetness that is the understanding of how the universe works. Because this incredible far flung universe is majestic, is bonkers. It's difficult to understand, but it's definitely worth digging into.
Yeah, because we hope that every episode you listen to is a little bit like Christmas, where you click on the episode and you open up an incredible and amazing gift of truth about the universe and how it works, and hopefully you won't return it.
Hopefully you didn't get two or three of these for Christmas, but.
You can regifted. You know, we give the gift that Jessica can be infinitely regifted.
I guess that's true. Yeah, And it is a goal of physics to unwrap the mysteries of the universe, to peel back layers and a wrapping paper, and to finally, maybe one day reveal what is going on underneath.
Yeah, because sometimes I think, Daniel, you talk about the days when they revealed big discoveries in the media, you call that kind of like a Christmas for physicists.
Yeah, it is really exciting, and that's what we live for. You know, it's not that often in physics that you actually make a really big discovery a day when you get to ask Nature a question and you've forced it because of the ingenuity of your experiments to reveal something to you. Those days come, you know, sometimes ten twenty years apart.
Yeah, and I guess the problem is if it's a discovery by one of these huge collaborations with like a thousand people, do you then have to leave a thousand cookies and milk glasses out for them?
You know, a big collaboration A physicists doesn't run on empty stomach. So yeah, the cookie budget is pretty serious.
Right, except then also it's coffee, not milk.
I guess it's expressed depending on where you are in the world.
Yeah, And there was a particularly interesting and fun discovery announcement, and back in twenty twelve that was a big deal. It was like a mega Christmas almost in the particle physics world.
It was. And you know how you anticipate Christmas. You start thinking about it in the fall, and then as December comes it gets more and more exciting, and then the night before Christmas you're just going absolutely bonkers wondering what you're going to get under the tree. Well, for us, the discovery the Higgs boson was like that, except over fifty years, fifty years between the prediction that the Higgs boson was a thing, and the day we could say it is a thing, it is real, It's out there in the universe.
Oh man, I should do that with my kids. It's like the next Christmas is fifty years from now. That's when you'll get your presents.
They're going to give you fifty times long a list then, right.
But then they have to be good for all those fifty years. That might be worth it.
It might be worth it. Yeah, you're definitely not screwing up their childhood death.
Well I am, but it's just a matter of how, of course. But yeah, it was a pretty big discovery, the discovery of the Higgs boson, or I guess not the discovery, but the confirmation that it exists, right, is that the same thing?
No, I think it was a discovery. We didn't know for sure that the Higgs was real before we saw it. There was a great idea, It was a beautiful and brilliant idea to bring together all these various pieces and explain them in terms of the Higgs boson. It really pulled everything together in an elegant way. But we weren't sure. It could have been wrong, and that's why we do experiments, right, because we don't just sit in the back of a cave and think about how the universe might be. We actually go out there and try to discover it and force it to reveal the truth to us. That's what science is all about. It's doing experiments to confirm our understanding. So I would definitely call it a discovery.
Right, Right, But you mean metaphorically you don't go out of the cave because the large Hadron Collider isn't a cave technically, right.
It's true. I guess we don't go out of the cave. We do the experiments in the cave. We bring the world into the cave. Screw you, Plato.
You build all the equipment inside, kind of like the bat Cave, so you and Batman are right up there.
That's right. We're writing a new chapter to Plato's algorithm to.
But it was a pretty big discovery, right, the discovery of the Higgs boson. It sort of completed what's known as the standard model.
Yeah. Without that piece, we really didn't understand some basic things about the particle and how they all whizz through the universe. We didn't understand why the W and the Z bosons, for the weak force were so heavy, whereas the photon was so light. We didn't understand where the other particles, how they got their mass. It was a big puzzle. And so now that we know the Higgs is real and we know something about how that happens.
Yeah, and the idea is that the Higgs boson and the Higgs field is what gives other particles their inertial mass. Right, We've just talked about this in a recent podcast.
We talked about this in lots of podcasts. Absolutely, the Higgs is the reason that particles are not massless. The electron and the quarks and lots of these other particles have some mass. It changes how they move through the universe, and that's because of the way they interact with the Higgs field.
Yes, so the Higgs is sort of like the you know, the host of the Christmas party making sure everyone gets enough mass kind of eat eat exactly. But then I guess that raises the question, what about the Higgs itself?
Who is making sure the host's plate is also full of cookies?
Yeah, So to the on the program, we'll be asking the question, where does the Higgs boson get its mass? WHOA, that's a pretty meta question if you're if you're familiar with particle physics.
Yeah, exactly, it's like, does Santa give himself presents? Does he get presence from somebody else? Either way, it's kind of weird.
I would think it was Missus Santa who get Santa presents, right.
All right, and so then Santa gets her presence.
Also, yeah, the Santas are their own Santas.
Did they whisper thank you Santa to each other on Christmas Morning?
They write Dear Santa letters to themselves. Every time they write an email to each other or send a text message, they're literally writing to Santa.
Yeah.
But then I would say Missus Santa, she's the super Santa because she's Santa Santa, right, Like everybody else gets their presence from Santa, and Santa gets his presence from Missus Santa, and she's sort of like at the top of the pyramid.
I see you're saying Santa is just like the Wizard of Uz, He's just the front man.
Exactly, he's the front man. Really, it's Missus Santa pulling the strings behind the curtain.
She is a supervillain, the final boss. If you want to get your presence I mean, you know, but yeah, it's a pretty deep question. I guess.
You know.
We talk about all the time how the Higgs boson gives the mass to the other particles. You know, when you interact with the Higgs field, that when you feel yourself heavy or inert, and the Higgs boson is sort of how you interact with the Higgs field. But then the Higgs I guess particle itself has mass also mm hm.
The Higgs particle definitely has mass. And one of the big experimental challenges for us before we discovered it was that we didn't know how much mass it had. If it had had more mass than it does, it would have been much harder to find, and if it had had less mass, we would have found it years ago. And as it changes its mass, it looks different in the universe, and so we had to look for lots of different kinds of Higgs is at the same time because we didn't know which one our universe had.
Wow, well, it is a pretty meta and a little bit mind bending question. It kind of gives me a headache to think about a little bit. And so we were wondering, as usual, how many people out there had thought about this question, this sort of recursive question, and so Daniel went out there into the internet as usual to ask people where does the Higgs boson get its mass?
And so, if you're sitting at home and you like to play along with this part of the podcast wondering if you know the answers to this question, then I encourage you to send in your answers. If you'd like to get some headache making questions in your inbox, just write to us two questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Yeah, and you'll send them all on Christmas.
Right, that's all right. I'm the Missus Santa of physics.
Well here's what people had to say. The first thing that comes to mind is the Higgs field.
But given that the Higgs boson is a widow in that field itself, I don't know if that makes any sense. Probably the Higgs bossoon get its mass from itself, because I know it gives mass to other particles. The Higgs boson definitely gets its mass from its local church.
I cannot point a finger to a place Higgs field gives mess, but Higgs buzzle when he gets his mess, I don't know.
I believe that it is a field as well as a particle, and I know that it imparts mass to other particles. But as far as where it gets its mass, I would say maybe the field around it.
I don't know, but from the chatter I hear from scientists and shows such as yours, I get the idea that to a three D being such as ourselves, it would seem as if that mass is coming from somewhere else in space. That's the best I can do for you.
So I think Higgs boson would get its mass from dark matter. I think the Higgs boson might be massless. It's a boson like the photon or glue or graviton or w or that the boson. I think it probably doesn't have mass itself. But if you're excited field it'll decay into stuff that does have mass.
I thought it was like mess. Doesn't it give the mess to other things? So where does it get it? Maybe? Space hamsters?
Space hamsters. That's a great answer.
Space hamsters is a great answer for any question.
Really, what would you like for lunch today?
Or have you been good this year? Space hamsters? That's all I have to say.
Who made this mess in the kitchen? Space hamsters?
Yeah? So a pretty wide range of answers here, mostly questions themselves. M Everyone's like what what?
Yeah. I think this made people realize that there was maybe an angle to this question. They maybe hadn't considered it before. That's why I thought this would be really fun to talk about.
I like the person who said the higgs Boson gets its mass from its local church. Like this, the higgs Boson go to mess. It is called the God Particles. Maybe it is the higgs Boson's church.
Yeah, and you know, Saint Peter Higgs of course discovered it, and so it all hangs together.
Yeah, there's a Saint Peter in the church of the higgs Boson Higgism.
Yeah, and you know, the name the God Particle just comes from that book by Leon Laterman a couple of decades ago. Nobody in the field ever calls it the God particle. We just rolled our eyes when we hear that.
You grow And every time I mentioned that on.
The podcast, mostly out of jealousy because his book sold so many copies.
Well, that's your Probably we should name our books. I don't know, the Devil particle, the devil. Oh, yeah, there you go.
You know I was looking at the list of science podcasts recently and noticed that we're up there on the list, but we're well behind several other science podcasts, including The Bigfoot Chronicles and The Paranormal. And in the list of science podcasts, they're mostly about the supernatural.
Whoa, yeah, I noticed that as well. It's a little makes me wonder how they categorize these things.
Yeah, maybe we should pivot and our podcast should be about like, you know, quantum bigfoot.
Yeah, or the electron blocked this monster.
Or maybe we should just double down and go for like supernatural bigfoot combined at all, you know, oh.
Interesting, Or we could just talk about things that bend reality and seem supernatural themselves, like particle physics.
Yeah, exactly. The universe is bonkers enough. We don't need to add alien bigfoot that built the pyramids.
No, we don't, but they would make it a little bit more interesting.
For sure, we might get more listeners.
But yeah, we're asking the question what gives the Higgs boson itself its mass? Because we know the Higgs boson gives other particles mass, and so where does it get its mass? And so you talked about that it does have mass, meaning Daniel the Higgs boson, I guess is heavy, like it doesn't move at the speed of light.
That's right, The Higgs boson cannot move at the speed of light because it has mass, and nothing that has mass in move at the speed of light, and everything that doesn't have mass always moves at the speed of light. So the Higgs has one hundred and twenty five giga electron volts of mass. That's a unit where one giga electron volt is about the mass of a proton, So the Higgs is about one hundred and twenty five protons worth of mass.
Well, but I guess you know, if the Higgs boson can move at the speed of light, and that's the particle that gives other particles mass, does that mean that my mass there's like a delay to my mass. Do you know what I mean? Like I have mass when the Higgs boson gets to me.
Well, information does propagate through the Higgs field at the speed of light, so you can have wiggles in the Higgs field that move at the speed of light, because not every wiggle in the Higgs field is a Higgs boson, but a Higgs boson particle itself doesn't travel at the speed of light. So if you made a Higgs boson and you threw it to me, it would be outraced by a photon. But for example, if the Higgs field collapsed because it's some crazy experiment you were doing over there in your basement, then the collapse of the Higgs field would move at the speed of light.
I see, all right, but yeah, I guess you know. The idea that it gives me mass is mostly about me interacting with the Higgs field, not necessarily with the Higgs boson. Right, Like, when I'm moving through space, I'm not getting bombarded by Higgs bosons. I'm just kind of moving through this molasses field. But if I wiggle the molasses, then that creates a Higgs boson.
Yeah, and you know, there's a bit of a fine point there, depends on whether you like to think about fields or you'd like to think about particles. I like to think about fields, that the fundamental thing in space is all these quantum fields, and a particle is like a special excited configuration of those fields. There are people out there that like to think about everything in terms of particles. Particles are the real thing, and fields are just like a mathematical construct and instead of fields, they think about virtual particles. You know that everything we would call a wiggle in the field is just a bunch of virtual Higgs bosons. So you can think about it in both ways. Both pictures are mathematically accurate. I think it's clear to think about the field as the basic element of the universe, hmm.
Right, right, And the Higgs boson gives particles mass, but not all of its mass, right, Like, it only gives particles one type of.
Mass, that's right. And so you mentioned something earlier, inertial mass. There's really a couple of ways we talk about mass. One is gravitational mass, and that's like if you have mass, then you bend space and you can create gravity and all that kind of stuff. That's one concept of mass. We're talking about something else today. We're talking about inertial mass. That's like the mass in F equals ma. Right. F equals ma tells us that if you want to accelerate something, that's the a. You got to give it a force, you got to push it. That's the F and mass is the relationship between that. If you want to give something a big acceleration, you have to give it a big force, but if it's got a lot of mass, it's going to require even more force to get a big acceleration. So it's that mass the m in f equals ma that we're talking about. We're talking about how an object moves when you push it, does it accelerate a lot or does it accelerate a little?
Right, it's the mass is in like how hard it is to move it from here to there. Because there are there are other kinds of masses, right, there's gravitational mass, which is sort of like how you get attracted to other massive things.
Yeah, and this is really about how something moves, how hard it is to push it, or how hard it is to slow it down. Right, this concept of inertia, that's what we call it inertial mass. And it's helpful, I think to spend a minute thinking about what that really means. You know, we're talking about what it's like to move something through space, or to speed it up or to slow it down. Any property of an object that changes how easy it is to speed it up or how easy it is to slow it down changes its inertia, and so we call that a change in mass. So that's really what mass is is a combination of everything that makes it easier or harder for that object to move, to get sped up or to get slowed down.
Right, And if you're just sort of a regular particle run of the male particle, the reason you're hard to move from here or there is because of the Higgs field exactly.
So, if it was no Higgs field in the universe, an electron would have no mass. It would act like a photon. But because the Higgs field is there, the electron is interacting with the Higgs field like the Higgs field is changing the way the electron moves, and it changes the way the electron moves in exactly the same way as if the electron actually had its own mass. There's no difference mathematically. That was really the genius of the Higgs mechanism is to come up with this other way for a particle to effectively get mass. That's why we call it like the Higgs boson gives it mass or the electrons get mass, because it's this interaction that changes the way the electron moves in exactly the same way as if the electrons woorlt of inherently had a pure mass to itself.
You're saying, like if it inherently was hard to move, Like if the universe worked in that way where things are hard to move if they have something called mass.
Yeah, it's possible for a particle to have like its own inherent mass for that not to be zero. But for all the particles we have, they come from the Higgs boson. So the electron and all the quarks that have zero inherent mass, all of their mass comes from this interaction of the Higgs boson. And so for the mathematically inclined people out there who know about like equations of motions and lagrongens, you know, this changes effectively how a particle gets kinetic energy, and so it changes the equations of motions for how it moves in exactly the same way as if it had this pure mass m right.
Right, So we get our inertial mass from the Higgs field, but not all inertial mass is due to the Higgs field. Right. It can be hard to move and not interact with the Higgs field.
Yeah, And this is a common misconception people think that all mass comes from the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson does give mass to the electron and to the quarks, But there are other things in the universe that have mass that don't come from the Higgs boson. For example, you you have a lot of mass that doesn't come from the Higgs. Like if you look at a proton, a proton is made of three quarks. Those quarks really don't have a lot of mass, but the proton does have a lot of mass, and most of its mass doesn't come from those quarks. It comes from other internal energy inside the proton, And any kind of stored energy also gives mass to an object.
M right, like you were saying, and this kind of blew my mind that black holes can have mass but they don't interact with the Higgs field.
Yeah, black holes, for example, have a lot of mass. Right, we don't know what's inside a black hole. We have no idea the state of matter that's in there. And you could, for example, have a black hole made purely of photon. Photons have no mass, but together you concentrate all this stuff together into space, and a black hole made purely of photons can have mass and none of that comes from the Higgs field.
Meaning like the black hole is hard to move, Like if you wanted to move a black hole. It would be hard, well, it'd be hard to sort of push it anyways, but it'd be hard to move. But it doesn't interact with the Higgs field when it moves.
No, it does not interact with the Higgs field when it moves. The Higgs field only interacts with things that feel the weak force. Right, the Higgs boson is sort of a part of the weak force, and so black holes, for example, made out of photons don't have any interaction with the weak force. And it's not just black holes.
Right.
You take a box of photons that has mass. You put a bunch of photons into a box. Now that box has some mass.
What I just filled a box with light?
Like, take a box and line it with perfect mirrors on the inside and shoot a laser in it and then close it. Now that box has some mass. Why because it has internal stored energy, and that gives things mass in a way that we don't really understand. Things that have internal stored energy have mass. They are harder to move, the property of stored energy in our universe.
Wow, sounds like a great gift that could give my kids next year. It's just the box of light. I'll tell them here's a bunch of mass, just to shine a flashlighting, close the box and then give.
It to I have a massive gift for you kids.
You're gonna light it. And also, interestingly, dark matter doesn't get mass from the Higgs. But we know definitely dark matter is matter, and it has some sort of inertial mass because it's zipping around at this meat of light, but it doesn't interact with the Higgs. Feel.
Yeah, we think that dark matter does not interact with the weak force because we've been looking for it. We have these detectors underground where we think dark matter wind will pass through and if it feels the weak force, we'll bump into a xenon atom, and we haven't seen it. And if it did feel the weak force, we really should have seen it by now. That tells us pretty clearly that dark matter doesn't feel the weak force. And to get mass from the Higgs, you have to feel the weak force. Electrons and quarks and all the objects that get their mass from the Higgs do it through the force. So if dark matter doesn't feel the weak force, can't get its mass from the Higgs. That's most of the mass in.
The universe, right, Yeah, it's like sixty seven percent of all the mass in the universe, seventy eighty.
It's more like eighty percent. Yeah.
Wow. But so where does dark matter get its mass? Is there a dark Higgs?
Yeah, there could be a dark Higgs exactly. There could be a whole dark sector with a dark Higgs boson. There could be other mechanisms to get mass.
That'd be like having a dark Santa Claus, like a grinch. I guess they were like an anti Santa Claus.
That's the topic of our upcoming book, the Devil particle.
That's right, The dark anti Sania is the devil. There you go, and it has its own dark mass.
Yeah. And so in the end, the Higgs boson gives mass to like the tiniest fraction of the universe, you know, of all the mass in the universe. It only gives mass to the electrons and the quarks and the w's and the z bosons. But that's the tiniest fraction of even protons, which are a tiny fraction of all the mass that's out there. So god particle is a bit of an overstatement.
That's right, More like a demigod particle.
Maybe it's a minor deity particle at best.
Yeah, it's really a saint particle.
There you go.
All right, Well, let's get into what gives the Higgs boson itself mass, because we know it gives mass to the electron and the cork, and we're all made out of electrons and corks, so even though it's not that significant in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty significant to us. But what gives the Higgs itself, it's mass, So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the Higgs boson and what gives itself mass. We know the Higgs boson gives mass to the electron and the quarks, which is what we're all made out of. But what gives the Higgs itself? It's mass. Because the Higgs has mass. It ate too many cookies.
I think the Higgs looks great. Man, come on, that's Higgs positive.
That's right. We want to practice particle positivity here, but not on the electron. We can be as negative as we want with that one.
Oh man, I try to be neutral about the Higgs.
All right? Yeah, So what gives a Higgs itself mass? Like? Does it interact with itself? Is there another like Higgs particle that gives a Higgs mass?
So it's super interesting. Actually, there's lots of really fascinating wrinkles here, but the short answer is to the Higgs gets mass from two different places, one from itself and the other is from all the other particles that it interacts with.
WHOA, So you can get mass from two different places.
Yeah. Anything that changes how you move through the universe. Anything that changes essentially your inertia changes your mass. And so as particles interact with other particles as they fly through the universe, it can change their mass. Just the same way. An electron flying through the universe is interacting with the Higgs field in a way that changes its mass. It could interact with other things in the same way to change its mass.
Oh, that's weird, but that's not true. For like the electron on the quark right, But like the electron doesn't interact with itself, It only interacts with the Higgs fields to get mass.
The electron doesn't directly interact with itself, that's right. It interacts with other particles though, like the photon. But those interactions we don't think necessarily give it mass. The interactions with the Higgs field do give it mass.
Let's get into each of these. So how does it get mass from itself? Like, it makes itself hard to move? Why is it holding itself back, Daniel, Why doesn't it just free itself?
It hasn't achieved total Higgs positivity yet now jokes aside. The Higgs boson is really interesting and weird because it interacts with itself. Like two Higgs bosons flying through the universe will bounce off of each other, which is not true of other particles, like photons don't bounce off of each other. Photons only interact with particles that have electric charge, and since the photon itself is neutral, two photons will pass right through each other, two Higgs bosons will not. So that means that the Higgs boson, as it's flying through the universe feels the Higgs field just like the electron does, and just like the quarks do.
Well, that means you're a Higgs field, you're your furtivation in the Higgs field. You're moving along and you have trouble going through your own field kind of.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It couples to itself, and so those wiggles in the Higgs field affect the wiggles in the Higgs field, which affect the wiggles in the Higgs field. And this is sort of like very crazy nonlinear exponential effect there whoa, which you know, it's a convergent series fortunately, and so the Higgs boson ends up giving itself some mass.
Well because you know, like the electron doesn't have trouble going through its own field, right, or the quarks don't have trouble going through their own field, but somehow the Higgs field, it has trouble going through itself.
Yeah, and the electron doesn't couple to the electron field. Right, it couples to the photon field. So imagine two fields in space, the electron field and the electromagnetic field. That's the field of the photon. Those two fields talk to each other, right, Electrons create photons which whiz through the universe, but it also can loop back. Right. The photon field then talks to the electron field, and so there are similar kinds of effects. For the electron doesn't directly talk to itself, but it can sort of interact with itself through other fields because its energy can wash into the photon field and back into the electron field. The Higgs does it directly, right, and the photon doesn't, which makes this quite interesting. But gluons can also. Gluons can interact with themselves.
Yeah, they're pretty sticky in that way. Hysticulous. But one interesting thing is that we don't You haven't like measured this effect, and you're not quite sure how important it is.
Yeah. So the Higgs boson gets its mass from two different ways. One is that it interacts with itself and the other is interacting with the other particles. We don't know how much of its mass comes from either category because we haven't yet been able to measure the Higgs interacting with itself, and it would actually look really interesting, Like in a particle collider, if you made a higgs and give it a lot of extra energy, the interaction with itself sometimes would look really weird. A Higgs boson would turn into three higgs bosons, like a single Higgs goes to a triple higgs.
Wait, what, like it has so much energy it can like have offsprings.
Yeah, exactly. So we think about these particles in terms of these like little interactions. They're like little tinker toys you can use to build up more complicated things. For example, electron flying through the universe can create a photon, so you have this little interaction. We have an electron line coming in, an electron line going out, and a photon line coming out. Also, for a Higgs boson, it's more complicated. You can have four Higgs lines coming into a single point, which means you can have a single Higgs line coming in and three Higgs is coming out, or you can have two higgs is coming in and two Higgs is coming out. And so this is really strange interaction, but it's not very powerful, and so we haven't seen it, yet we need to do lots of particle collisions before we see evidence of this actual interaction happening.
I see. So then, how do you know these two ways of getting mass exist? How do you know that this is how the Higgs gets its mess if you don't know what the actual effect is.
So we're not still one hundred percent sure, because you know, we found this thing. It looks like the Higgs boson so far, everything we've discovered about it describes the Higgs boson we expected to see. But you know, we do need to nail down these details. Like when we first saw it, all we knew was that there was some new particle that turned into two photons, and then we found okay, it also does these other things we expect the Higgs boson to do. So we're still not one hundred percent sure sort of what exactly it is. We've discovered we think it operates this way. Some of these things are still theoretical and haven't been exactly nailed down. Many of them. By now and ten years later, we have seen and measured and it's doing exactly what we expect, but there are still room for surprises there. We're not one hundred percent sure.
Interesting, but you sort of know it is interacting with itself. It does sort of auto interacts.
We're not one hundred percent sure. We haven't measured that exactly, so we haven't isolated that interaction and proven that it exists in our universe. In the theory, it does, but it's possible, you know that there's something else going on. I see, we're pretty sure. We're just having experimentally verify that one hundred percent.
Right, right, And you said the other way that it gets mass is through interactions with other particles.
Yeah, and so, as we mentioned earlier, the Higgs interacts with all these other particles, and any particle flying through space can do all sorts of things. Right, when you think about a quantum particle going from A to B, you shouldn't think about it like calmly floating through space by itself, the way like a baseball might go from your hand to your friend's hand. These particles are always doing something. They're always like surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles. They're constantly interacting with the fields around them. And so when a Higgs boson flies through space, for example, it's interacting with the top quark field, and with the electroweak field, and with the electron fields and all these things. It's constantly interacting with them. It can like turn into a top an anti top particle, and then back into a Higgs boson momentarily. And so all these interactions also change how the Higgs boson flies through space, which means it changes effectively how they Higgs boson moves, which means they change the Higgs mass.
Interesting, it's sort of like the Higgs is so popular that when it tries to go through a party, it's like trying to talk to everybody. That slows it down.
Yeah, the more you interact, the more there's the possibility to gain or lose mass as you move through the universe. These interactions can both have positive or negative contributions to your mass, depending on how they change how you move.
Wait, what so, like, I'm a Higgs boson, I'm flying through space, and I guess I have to interact with all the other fields that are around me because I'm the Higgs boson. I'm a popular particle. But what if there's nothing in those fields. I know, the electron field is all around us, but there aren't electrons and every spot in space.
Yeah, there aren't electrons in every spot in space, but those fields are never at zero, right, Every quantum field fills all of space and they never actually at zero. Like if you think about empty space, it still has those fields in them, and quantum fields because their quantum could never be totally relaxed down to zero. There's always a little bit of energy in all of them fields. So if you're in a Higgs boson, you're always interacting with the electron field. You don't need like an actual electron to be there. You can think about it like as virtual electrons if you prefer, rather than thinking about the electron field.
Like a potential electron.
Yeah, exactly, the possibility to have an electron. Yeah.
Right, So then you're saying, like, the Higgs boson interacts with all these other fields, and so that's what or potentially interacts with these other fields, and that's what slows it down.
That's one thing that changes its mass, right, And it's not just about slowing it down, it's about changing how easy it is to speed up or to slow down.
Right.
Inertia is not just about like velocity, it's about acceleration. So it's about changes in velocity and one of the really interesting thing about interacting with the other particles is that some of those interactions make the higgs heavier and some of those interactions make the higgs lighter because of the way the minus signs come out in these calculations.
Wait, what like on an individual basis, like on on an event basis, or like on a per field basis, on a per field like some fields boost up the higgs and some fields slow down.
Yeah. For example, if you interact with boson fields like the W and the Z, or any particle with integer spin bosons, then it goes in one direction, and if you interact with fermion fields like the electrons and the quarks, it goes in the other directions. So fermions and bosons are playing like this tug of war, or one of them is making the higgs heavier, the other one is making the higgs lighter.
WHOA, So if one of them went away, Like, could the higgs boson have negative mass?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It could drive it down to zero, but it could never actually go negative. Negative mass doesn't make any sense, right, M I don't.
Know, you tell me. I know we've talked about the idea of negative mass on the podcast before, like, maybe you can create anti gravity with negative mass.
Yeah, negative mass is not something we've seen. So there are some theoretical explorations of that possibility, and we actually did a whole podcast episode about exotic particles and negative mass, so if you want to learn more about that, go dig into that. So in theory, it is possible, I should say to have negative mass, right. One of the really interesting things though, is that these corrections the things that make the particle heavier or lighter, These things are huge. These things are much much bigger than the actual mass of the particle. If the particle has one hundred and twenty five protons worth of mass, but these corrections, they're like a billion protons worth of mass or ten billion protons worth of mass, meaning.
Like the overwhelming majority of its mass it gets it from interacting with other fields like it itself interacting with itself is not as strong.
We actually don't know. The interesting thing is that these corrections sort of cancel out. It's sort of like take the number one hundred, add a billion to it, now subtract a billion. That's how the Higgs boson has a mass of about one hundred. And the interesting thing is that those corrections come really really close to canceling out. Like the top quark field makes the hig much much much much heavier, and then the w Boson field makes the HIGs much much much much more lighter. And those two effects, which really could have almost been any number, managed to almost perfectly cancel out. I mean, the Higgs boson could have had a mass of a billion or ten billion protons, but these effects, these really huge effects to sort of manage to cancel out to keep the Higgs boson mass pretty small.
Interesting like they cancel out statistically or like before it even gets moving.
So for an individual Higgs boson, all these things are just sort of happening simultaneously. And you know, the mass comes from the interaction with these fields, and so all these effects are happening all the time, and so it happens for every individual Higgs boson. Like all the Higgs bosons have the same mass. It's not like there's a population of higgs is with different masses.
I see, or like well, I mean, like what if you have a Higgs surrounded by a bunch of electrons, it might have a different mass, would it.
Yeah, that's a really cool question. You might imagine that if there are more fermions nearby that would like strengthen it. But the interaction comes from the field itself, and whether or not the field is excited doesn't change how much it interacts with the Higgs. I see.
Interesting. So then what's kind of the overall mass of the Higgs field, Like what is it in the range of an electron or a proton or a quark.
So the thing that we've measured in our collider has one hundred and twenty five proton worth of mass, and so there's different contributions. There's the mass it gets from itself, which is some unknown number we haven't measured yet we think is somewhere close to one hundred. And then there's huge added contributions from top quarks, for example, around the number of a billion. And then there's huge negative contributions from like w's and z bosons at also about a billion. So you have like one hundred plus a billion minus a billion comes out to be around one hundred and twenty five.
Oh.
I see. So actually most of its mass comes from its interaction with itself. The rest of its mass is sort of cancels out.
Yeah, and the fact that those two things cancel out is like one of the deepest mysteries in physics, Like why did do two huge numbers exactly cancel out? It's like if somebody said I'm going to give you a random amount of money between zero and a trillion dollars, and I'm also going to bill you a random amount of money between zero and a trillion, you would be surprised if those two numbers came to within one hundred dollars of each other. But that's basically the story of our universe.
Whoa weird. Yeah, that's very suspicious.
Is very suspicious, And anytime you have like a coincidence like that in physics, you're like, hmm, let me go look for a reason. Maybe this tells me that there's something deeper going on.
Right, right, It's like, how come the milk disappeared on Christmas morning and Dad has a milk bluster? That's very strange.
Then maybe there's a similar explanation that unifies all the data exactly.
That's right, Yeah, maybe there's a simpler Santa hypothesis. All right, Well, let's get into what does it mean that the Higgs interacts with itself, and what does it mean that all of its interactions with the other fields cancel out. So let's get into that, but first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we are going deep into the Higgs field and the Higgs boson today. What gives the Higgs its mass? We know the Higgs gives mass to other particles, but what gives the Higgs itself mass? And we broke it down to it mostly it's interaction with itself.
Well, there are these three contributions. We don't actually know how much of it comes from itself. We think it might be around one hundred, but it's sort of a guess. We need to measure that exactly, and we can measure that when we look for this Higgs interaction with itself in the particle collider. So that's something we have to look forward to in particle experiments in the future to nail down exactly how much comes from itself.
Maybe the Higgs doesn't want you to know how much mass it has. It's a private number.
I'm sorry, Higgs. It's for the good of the universe.
Okay, right, we all have to make sacrifices.
That's right. This is your role, all right.
So what does it all mean, Daniel? What can we learn about this weird part of our universe?
Well, it might mean that there's something going on. You know, anytime you see a coincidence in physics, you wonder like, is that really a coincidence or is there a reason? You know, It's like if you flip a coin a million times and then you discovered, hm, the number of heads and the number of tails add up to be a million, You're like, well, that's obvious, right, it's because heads and tails are connected. You can only have one for each flip. If you didn't understand the connection between heads and tails, it might seem like a big coincidence to you. So here we have what seems like a really big coincidence that the top quark makes the Higgs super heavy and the w makes it much much lighter, and it all comes out to be to almost cancel that seems like a weird coincidence.
Like it has a whole bunch of plus billions and a whole bunch of negative billions, and somehow they all add up to almost zero.
Yeah, I all add up to almost zero. That's really weird, and we wonder if there's a reason. And because we have other particles that have similar situations, and there is a reason. For example, you might ask, what about the photon. The photon also flies through space, it interacts with other fields. Why don't all those other fields end up giving the photon mass?
Right?
What is the interaction of the photon with the w and with the electrons make the photon massive? And there is a reason. There's a symmetry in the universe. We talked about it once. It's a gauge symmetry that protects the photon. It says, the photon can only do its job of protecting this gauge symmetry if it has no mass. So all those things have to add up to be exactly zero. So that's true for the photon. It's also true for the gluon. The gluon interacts with all sorts of crazy things, but all those things have to add up to zero because there's a color symmetry for the strong force. So we've identified these symmetries in the universe that protect the photon and the gluon. As far as we know, the higgs doesn't have that kind of symmetry. There's no other thing in the universe that would insist that the Higgs have everything balance.
Out like it almost cancels out to zero. So maybe I don't know, maybe it's not really there. Maybe there is a symmetry with the Higgs that you're not seeing. Is that possible.
That's exactly it, And that's what people are wondering, like, maybe this is a hint that there's some other weird new symmetry out there in the universe. And so this is the genesis of the whole idea of supersymmetry, this idea that maybe there are more particles out there. Remember we said that fermi make the Higgs heavier and bosons make the Higgs lighter. Well, one way to explain how that all balances out perfectly is to say, well, maybe for every fermion there's a boson and they balance perfectly, and then for every boson there's a fermion and they balance perfectly.
Wait, you're saying white doesn't balance out perfectly, right, because it doesn't balance out perfectly for the Higgs.
We don't know exactly how well it balances out, because it could be that the Higgs mass all comes from its own self interactions, or it could be that it almost balances out perfectly. Either way, there's something going on because these big numbers are either exactly canceling or almost exactly canceling. Either way, there must be some explanation. Oh, I see, really weird if that was totally random.
I think you're saying that in your theories it's not canceling out, which either means your theories are missing something or just the weird thing about the Higgs.
M M.
You don't know for sure, right, We don't know for sure. It could be balancing out, but you haven't measured it.
Yeah, and we're not one hundred percent sure if all those quantum corrections perfectly balance out, or if they all most balance out. But either way, something weird is going on because you're adding and subtracting two arbitrary numbers that are both in the trillions, and they're canceling out almost exactly, So something is keeping them close to each other. And one way to keep those numbers close to each other to have it be like they have to be close to each other. The way like the number of heads plus the number of tails has to equal the number of coin flips is to double the number of particles. So every time you have a top quark which makes it heavier, you have a boson particle we call it the STOPQRK, which makes it lighter and exactly the same amount. And if you have a w particle that makes it lighter, you add a new particle called the we know, which makes it heavier. So for every fermion, you create a new boson, and forever boson, you create a new fermion, and then they just naturally cancel out because there's this symmetry to them. It's like they're coming these pairs where one of them makes it heavier and one of them makes it lighter.
Right, So I think you're saying, like, if we assume that the Higgs boson is supposed to be like a coin flip, then there's something wrong. But maybe like it's not a coin, maybe it's like a more like a die maybe or like a three sided coin.
Yeah, maybe there's something else going on exactly, And there are a bunch of different ideas for how to balance those things out and how to keep the Higgs boson close to zero mass. And then some people think, hey, maybe it's just a coincidence, you know, maybe it is just a bunch of coin flips and we just happened to get a Higgs boson that doesn't weigh very much, and that's just the universe we're in. Maybe it's all just random.
Right, right, Yeah, Like, maybe that is just it is because that's the way it is. Or maybe there are like multiple universes. That's the other theory, right, Like, maybe there's a whole bunch of an infinite number of universes, some in which the Higgs has a different mass.
Yeah, and if the Higgs had the mass of you know, ten trillion, for example, the universe would be very very different. It would look very different, and we might not be here to ask the questions. So that's sort of the anthropic answer, is to say, you don't need an explanation because you only notice it because it happens to have these values, and if it had different values, you wouldn't be here to notice, right. I don't really like that answer because it's a sort of unsatisfying.
That's right, because you're missing topic, right.
I am a little bit misynthropic, that's my principles. I like the supersymmetry answer. It's beautiful. It says, oh, there's this perfect balance in these things in the universe, and the reason they add up to zero is because there's this symmetry you haven't discovered yet. It's a nice story, right. The problem is that we don't see those other particles. If those particles existed, they would have to exist and have the same mass as the particles we know. The stop particle would have to have the same mass as the top particle. But we haven't seen it yet, and we should have seen it sort of by now. And so supersymmetry was a really exciting idea ten years ago or so. We thought we might find it at the Large Hadron Collider, but nothing.
Mmmm.
Yeah, you had to bummer.
You sound really bummed up. Imagine discovering that instead of having twelve particles, we have twenty four, right, Like you just double the number of particles you can play with and all these crazy things and they interact with each other, like it would have been a gold mine for particle physics, right, Instead, all we found was the Higgs boson and then nothing else after that.
Right, It's like, what if missus Sanda also came in gave you presence, you get double the number of presents.
Yes, exactly, that's the santasymmetry super santisymmetry.
But does that mean you're also sort of against this idea of the multiverse, Like from a theoretical physics point of view, it's not as elegant to have a multiverse.
I think the multiverse is elegant for other reasons, right, because it tells us something about the context of our universe, and it broadens the possibility of existence. I think it's cool from that point of view. I don't think it's a great way to answer these kinds of questions like why is this number the way that it is. It's not really an answer to say, well, it's just random and just just as the one you got mmm. I like answers that say, well, there's a reason for everything, and in the end, if you keep digging, if you keep unwrapping the presence, there is at the core a reason why the universe is this way and not some other way. That's the whole project of physics.
So sort of keeping up on that right, Right, you still have to work, right, I mean, you'd be out of a job if the universe was just random.
Yeah, And it's not just about my paycheck. It's about the curiosity, you know. I'm in this field and I think I'm a lot of people are curious about the universe because they think there are answers out there and that there's a moment where you could learn something about the universe and like, oh, wow, the universe is this way because of this, that makes perfect sense. How could we have not seen that before? That's the Christmas Morning that we are all hoping for in particle physics, and so to say, oh, there's not really an answer, that sort of takes away Christmas. Man.
Well, I mean, but I mean philosophically speaking, it's the very unscientific stance to have, right, an unscientific point of view. I mean, you have this feeling that maybe there's a real symmetry and beauty about the universe, but you don't know, right, it's just sort of a human feeling and you're going with your gut about that.
Yeah, But the scientific part of it is that we will accept whatever the universe says, and so We really wanted super symmetry to be there, and we went out and looked for it. We were all excited about it, and the universe said nope, there's nothing here, and we took it. We're not like insisting on super symmetry no matter what. If it's not there, it's not there. We're going to move on and find other ideas.
Right A, scenta doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. What are you gonna do exactly?
I'm not going to go on strike. But it did make finding the Higgs boson more complicated because we didn't know what its mass was going to be in advance. We didn't know how all these numbers added up. We didn't know maybe the Higgs boson is super duper crazy heavy in our universe and we could never even see it in our colliders. And so when we found the Higgs boson and measured it to be one hundred and twenty five, it was a lot of head scratching. People are like, that is a really weird number for all these reasons, right, Like, oh, it's alas to add up and cancel out just perfectly to get us such a small number.
Like you looked for it, where its interaction with itself, would say it is if you ignore the interaction with the other fields, and that's where you found it.
Yeah, I'm pretty close to where we found it.
Wow, So why did you look for it there? If it would be weird to find it?
We looked for it everywhere. We just didn't know in advance where it was going to be. You know, we've been looking for the Higgs bosons for years and the reason we say it took fifty years is that people started looking for the Higgs boson at much lower energy colliders because we could you know, I remember there was a time when we were working on the Tevatron, the colliders just outside Chicago, and there was a chance that it could discover the Higgs boson, but only if it was like less than one hundred and fifteen GeV or so. Anything heavier than that would be really hard to find. And so it was just sort of like up to nature, like are we going to find it here or do we have to wait for the next accelerator, And so you know, you just don't know, right.
Yeah, well you found it, you know, you sort of know where it is, how much it weighs, but there are still big mysteries about it, right Yes, and some that sort of really kind of pointed huge mysteries about the universe and maybe it's not sort of put together the way we think it is right now.
And I'd say it's one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics. I mean, people talk about dark matter and dark energy, these are questions about the universe. But this is a really huge problem in particle physics. Nobody understands why the Higgs isn't super duper crazy heavy, And it's a really big screaming clue that there must be something else going on in particle physics, some part of this puzzle that we're missing, but we haven't figured it out yet.
Wow, what would happen if the Higgs was super duper heavy? Would we also be super duper heavy?
Well, that's a really great question. Indirectly, it would change our mass. We get our mass from the Higgs field, and the value of our mass comes from like where the Higgs field settles into its lowest state, and that's partially determined by the mass of the Higgs boson. So the two are a little bit connected.
Right, So everything would be heavier.
Then everything would have a different mass. Yes, things would be a lot heavier. Oh wow, so we suspected that the Higgs was probably light. For that reason, it'd be hard for the Higgs to be super duper a massive and for us to have the universe that we do have. Weren't sure exactly what value it had.
I see, Oh, so it's all the Higgs fault.
It's all the Higgs faults, exactly.
It is.
After all, it's not the cookies, it's not your willpower, it's the Higgs. Thank you, Saint Peter.
Yes, thank you physicists for giving me an excuse. All right, Well, another huge mystery about the universe. I guess if you're in particle physics, I mean, this is the sort of the holy Grail kind of right now.
It really is. It's one of the deepest questions in physics, and one that we hope we might answer with another collider.
Oh conveniently, if we give you more money, you're saying you can solve this question.
That's right, we're passing around the collection plate. So I think the lesson is that every time we answer our question in physics, it just opens the door to an even bigger, deeper question. And I hope we just keep unwrapping those presents forever and ever.
Every day's Christmas, or potentially a Christmas Day for a physicist, except that every day is also not a Christmas Day, so you must be disappointed. Three hundred and sixty four days a.
Year, there's a lot of ups and downs.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy Tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's last sustainability.
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