Today finds me in Canada, at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, where I’ll be for the next few days. I’m attending a workshop on strategies for searching for new phenomena at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is bringing together a couple of dozen theorists like myself with experimentalists in leadership positions at the CMS experiment, one of the experiments at the LHC. More on that later, though I won’t be at liberty to discuss details.
Meanwhile, yesterday ATLAS and CMS, the two general purpose experiments at the LHC, released their pre-publication papers that summarize their observation of a new Higgs-like particle. (Here’s ATLAS’s and here’s CMS’s paper; they’ve been submitted now to the journal Physics Letters, which normally doesn’t publish tomes.) These documents give a more final form to the preliminary results that were presented by the two experiments July 4th, along with the additional preliminary result presented by ATLAS on July 18th (which I described briefly here). Revisions before publication are still possible though less likely.
Aside from the fact that there are lots of little changes in the results (as is to be expected when preliminary results become final) and a few new plots that are interesting to look at, the main new result is that ATLAS now presents a mass measurement, of 126.0 +/- 0.4 +/- 0.4 GeV/c2, for the new particle, completely consistent with CMS’s result that gives 125.3 +/- 0.4 +/- 0.5 GeV/c2. No real surprises here that I’ve noticed as yet.
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Advolvens,
My reply to your question: “Does the fact that a wave can move matter as it passes, and that that is a necessary feature of a water wave, mean that such a wave is itself matter?” My answer is most certainly yes.
Your next question: “That you could gather up a collection of waves and somehow fill a box with them (not their media, just the wave disturbances themselves)?” My answer would have been yes if not for the parenthetical part, therefore my answer is no. Here is how I will demonstrate the reason for my reply:
We all experience a multiplex of waves in a box every time we are in a room with many sounds. These sound waves bounce off the walls and interfere in such ways that they reinforce or cancel out their high and low pressures (compressions and rarefactions) of the air molecules. As an audio enthusiast I’ve played sine-wave tones and noted how the loudness changes based on the frequency and the position of my ears. For midrange frequencies I would move my head just a little bit to perceive a big difference in loudness. For low frequencies of about 40Hz or lower one needs to step in different parts of the room, particularly around the room walls to hear those tones strongly; step into the middle of the room and those frequencies disappear. For tones less than about 33Hz I can’t hear them at all unless I step into an adjoining room, because the wavelengths are so long. (I recently found a good deal on some nice subwoofers. I bought two to reduce the room-based low frequency sound nodes and skipped on buying the 12″ version because I knew that my room is not large enough to support the lowest frequencies that the 12″ version can do.)
Now then, all those complicated sound waves depend on the compression and rarefactions of a medium, in this case air. Remove the air from the room and the result is no more sound, no waves, no complicated diffractions and interactions, nothing.
You wrote: “Does this mean the wave *is* its medium?”
I would say that the wave is the part of the medium that has a higher or lower energy content than its ground state. By higher or lower energy content, in the case of air molecules, that means denser or more rarefied than the average room molecule density.
You wrote: “In the end, we cannot assign a rest mass to this wave (imagine a poor observer trying to measure such a thing), and yet it can knock people out of boats.”
Matter at rest relative to us, or any other piece of matter, has zero energy value. That is the subjective side of things. Matter has energy content to the degree that it interacts with us. When that wave of water capsized my boat it had a positive energy value. I think it is nonsensical to try to describe a wave in terms of rest mass. When physics says that a photon has zero rest mass I say, well sure, of course. If a photon were to be at rest relative to our frame of reference it would have zero energy. Zero energy equals zero mass, but only in a *subjective* sense. Since we find photons to be in motion (How would we find them if there weren’t in motion relative to us?) they should be considered to have mass like everything else.
Now then, I am not a physicist, so take what I say with a grain of salt if you wish.
–VS
Don’t get caught up on the fact that matter is moving as the wave passes. That is true; set that aside. Also, please keep your responses on point. I may not be quite so busy as Professor Strassler, but I have no desire to spend significant portions of my day analyzing Internet comments, and tangential paragraphs tend to obfuscate the critical points. As I can tell I’m unlikely ever to convince you of anything, I’m answering your questions primarily for the benefit of others who may be confused by what you write, and as the probability that others will read this goes down, I’m less likely to be willing to put much effort in. Anyway, let’s get to business.
If you force yourself to address these questions honestly, without answering them in a way designed to come to a predetermined conclusion, it should clarify things.
Does the fact that a wave can move matter as it passes, and that that is a necessary feature of a water wave, mean that such a wave is itself matter? That you could gather up a collection of waves and somehow fill a box with them (not their media, just the wave disturbances themselves)?
A water wave cannot propagate without its medium. Does this mean the wave *is* its medium?
In the end, we cannot assign a rest mass to this wave (imagine a poor observer trying to measure such a thing), and yet it can knock people out of boats. 🙂
Advolvens,
Thank you for your comments. Before I comment further let’s review what you wrote earlier on this same thread in response to “From Peru.” And I’ll include Matt’s congratulatory comments:
——————————————
Advolvens | August 8, 2012 at 1:43 PM |
@From Peru
I can’t fully parse your comment. The Higgs is not usually called a fifth force because it is not a gauge field, but it certainly produces an additional force / interaction between particles.
This is confusing because the concept of a “force” and “force-carrying” or “messenger” particle is poorly defined, kinda like the definition of a continent or planet. For example, in Compton scattering, a photon bouncing off an electron, the electron field mediates the interaction between the electron and photon. Does this mean that the electron is a force carrier and we in fact have more than 4 fundamental forces? Not really. It means that the division of the world into force carriers and matter particles is not meaningful (a division by spin is more meaningful), and that you should look to the Lagrangian for what interactions “should be” possible, not to a dubious classification scheme.
· Matt Strassler | August 13, 2012 at 5:51 PM |
This is a very well-written answer; I haven’t tried dealing with this subtlety on this website anywhere.
· Matt Strassler | August 13, 2012 at 6:24 PM |
Well said.
———————–
Now then, I agree with you that the “division of the world into force carriers and matter particles is not meaningful.” This also appears to conform to Erwin Schrödinger’s point of view as well, of which I quoted approvingly.
Yet the idea of no net motion doesn’t change anything for me in that there should always be matter as that which is responsible for motion and the transference of momentum.
Indeed, as F. Engels–who had a great sense of the dialectic of things–pointed out, motion is the mode of existence of matter, and that matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter.
That a particle, in a string of interactions—as in many kinds of situations found in nature–ultimately springs back to its original position doesn’t mean for me that there can be motion without matter. I am still arguing that there can be no motion without matter. If you guys really mean there can be motion without matter you still haven’t said anything yet to demonstrate that.
In the same way that we feel another persons touch when their touch is moving relative to our skin and when that motion stops we shortly lose sense of being touched, all experience sensations results from being continually touched by matter. That we experience the warmth from lower frequency of light or the damaging effects from the higher frequencies should, I believe, mean matter is impacting us. I think too much of what is unproductive and extra complicated with physics probably traces to the idea that there are zero mass particles. I’m in no position to reinvent physical models of how the universe works; yet I would note that most current models are pretty ugly constructions that haven’t led too much significant progress for some time. That a model agrees very well with experiments doesn’t prove that the underlying assumptions are valid; it just demonstrates that the theoretical constructs have a certain consistency. I think every force in nature, even the pseudo-force of gravity ultimately is derived from the simple foundation of matter-in-motion and that the direction theoreticians ought to be taking is with beginning principles that have logical simplicity.
Logically, mass/inertia should be an a priori of something that has existence and to ask why something exists is as a waste a time as it is as to ask why nothing exists. Both concepts, existence and non-existence, are meaningless by themselves. They are both necessary dialectical aspects that cannot be separated to explain anything.
To suppose that there can be motion that isn’t the result of matter is equivalent to creating matter from nothing. Some people don’t have a problem with creationism, but I’m not one of those people.
–VS
Let’s start here; we can agree about these two points:
1) Matter in motion can cause a collective phenomenon known as a wave. In such a wave, no individual matter particle experiences net motion, and yet momentum is transfered place to place. To reiterate: momentum is transfered, but matter experiences no net movement.
2) During the passage of a wave, matter is caused to move temporarily and locally, and this can knock people out of boats.
The confusion, I think, lies in the following statement:
>>Therefore a wave *is* matter.
Professor Strassler says no, false, that does not follow, and I agree. Do you disagree? Is that the question?
Matt,
I’ll try to be more deferential from now on.
So, let me try to get this right, if I’m in a little boat in the ocean and a big wave comes along and flips over my boat, I am not, according to current physical thinking, to believe that I was just knocked out of my boat because of matter-in-motion? That tall wave of water is matter but current physics thinking is saying no it isn’t? Am I getting that right? Is that what you are saying?
I think the predicament that I just exposed is due to the very popular thinking that matter and energy are separate things. I think they are the same. Apparently, so did the famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger who wrote:
“Today a physicist no longer can distinguish significantly between matter and something else. We no longer contrast matter with forces or fields of force as different entities; we know now that these concepts must be merged. It is true that we speak of “empty” space (that is, space free of matter), but space is never really empty, because even in the remotest voids of the universe there is always starlight—and that is matter.” From “What Is Matter?” Scientific American, September 1953.
I would also like to share the following from Frederick Engels’ Anti-Dühring (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science) first appearing in book form in 1878 in Leipzig, Chapter VI — Natural Philosophy, Cosmogony, Physics, Chemistry:
The materialists before Herr Dühring spoke of matter and motion. He reduces motion to mechanical force as its supposed basic form, and thereby makes it impossible for himself to understand the real connection between matter and motion, which moreover was also unclear to all former materialists. And yet it is simple enough. Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be. Motion in cosmic space, mechanical motion of smaller masses on the various celestial bodies, the vibration of molecules as heat or as electrical or magnetic currents, chemical disintegration and combination, organic life—at each given moment each individual atom of matter in the world is in one or other of these forms of motion, or in several forms at once. All rest, all equilibrium, is only relative, only has meaning in relation to one or other definite form of motion. On the earth, for example, a body may be in mechanical equilibrium, may be mechanically at rest; but this in no way prevents it from participating in the motion of the earth and in that of the whole solar system, just as little as it prevents its most minute physical particles from carrying out the vibrations determined by its temperature, or its atoms from passing through a chemical process. Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter. Motion is therefore as uncreatable and indestructible as matter itself; as the older philosophy (Descartes) expressed it, the quantity of motion existing in the world is always the same. Motion therefore cannot be created; it can only be transferred. When motion is transferred from one body to another, it may be regarded, in so far as it transfers itself, as active, as the cause of motion, in so far as the latter is transferred, is passive. We call this active motion force, and the passive, the manifestation of force. Hence it is as clear as daylight that a force is as great as its manifestation, because in fact the same motion takes place in both.
A motionless state of matter is therefore one of the most empty and nonsensical of ideas—a “delirious fantasy” of the purest water. In order to arrive at such an idea it is necessary to conceive the relative mechanical equilibrium, a state in which a body on the earth may be, as absolute rest, and then to extend this equilibrium over the whole universe. This is certainly made easier if universal motion is reduced to purely mechanical force. And the restriction of motion to purely mechanical force has the further advantage that a force can be conceived as at rest, as tied up, and therefore for the moment inoperative. For if, as is very often the case, the transfer of a motion is a somewhat complex process containing a number of intermediate links, it is possible to postpone the actual transmission to any moment desired by omitting the last link in the chain. This is the case, for instance, if a man loads a gun and postpones the moment when, by the pulling of the trigger, the discharge, the transfer of the motion set free by the combustion of the powder, takes place. It is therefore possible to imagine that during its motionless, self-equal state, matter was loaded with force, and this, if anything at all, seems to be what Herr Dühring understands by the unity of matter and mechanical force. This conception is nonsensical, because it transfers to the entire universe a state as absolute, which by its nature is relative and therefore can only affect a part of matter at any one time. Even if we overlook this point, the difficulty still remains: first, how did the world come to be loaded, since nowadays guns do not load themselves; and second, whose finger was it then that pulled the trigger? We may turn and twist as much as we like, but under Herr Dühring’s guidance we always come back again to the finger of God.
————————–
Also, I have been offering my opinions based on a philosophy that has served me very well for many years. That I say some things with the tone of much confidence is not the same as if I’m saying this opinion of mine, and some others, is the same as modern physics, of which I can see that it isn’t. I hope that you and the public reading your blog can understand this point. Please don’t take my provocative probing too personally.
Vincent – I am happy to have these conversations in principle, but in practice I’m a working physicist and I can’t deal with messages that contain twenty philosophical points. Please pick one, try to stay focused on a smaller set of topics, and let’s discuss it.
Okay, how about my being swept out of the boat analogy. Can you explain why my point might be wrong? That it wasn’t matter-in-motion that caused the upturning of the little boat?
[Having removed my links to my web site this should be postable now.]
Pedro,
I wish to thank you for taking the time to offer an “answer” to a couple of my questions.
Your answer appears a bit circular to me. In my philosophy if something moves and can transfer momentum (eliminating shadows) it is matter and consequently has mass/inertia. Any field, Higgs or otherwise, must already, a priori, be matter.
The universe can be extremely complicated. We are part of the universe and just look how complicated we are, but at the very bottom of all things, the foundations for a theory of knowledge and a physics must be empty space and space-occupying-matter. Without empty space matter could not move. Without matter-occupying-space there could not be a distinction between matter and empty space. Without these distinctions a universe could not come about. For more on this see my very short new essay “Why Does the World Exist? Why Does the Universe Exist? Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” at my web sites front page near the bottom. Click on my underlined name here to get to the front page.
The model that you say describes the weak force best by making use of theory that proposes or rather uses a “massless force carrier” is to me just magic making. I think such ideas are just dead ends and symptomatic of mathematics that has departed from good philosophy. For more on this point, I wish to recommend an article by Robert L. Oldershaw that I host on my web site: “The new physics-Physical or mathematical science?” Originally published in the American Journal of Physics, Vol. 56 (12), December 1988. To read this for free go to my home page, find the “links page” link, click that to find the article.
Your statements are simply false. You can have whatever philosophy you want, but it is not true that if something moves and can transfer momentum it is matter. Waves in the ocean can travel and transfer momentum across hundreds of miles, but they themselves are not matter; the ocean is the matter, and it doesn’t move much at all while the waves go by. And it is not true that the foundations for a theory of physics must be empty-space and space-occupying matter; there are counterexamples (found within string theory) for which there’s no space to start with at all. You cannot make physics from philosophy. The Greeks tried that, and it didn’t work. Mathematics worked much better; that’s where we got general relativity and quantum mechanics from, and our whole modern technological society is based on these. You should read more Bacon.
In any case, I don’t permit incorrect statements about physics to sit on this blog to confuse my readers, so please don’t flood us with your own personal brand of physics. Physics is a collective enterprise (even Einstein did not start from scratch, but built on the work of others) so please, if you want to reinvent it all yourself, just stick to your own website.
Four days ago I posted a reply to Pedro’s last post and it says on my browsers that my comment is awaiting moderation. Is there software within your site that does this if a persons post includes links to their own web site? I posted to another page at this site with no links and it posted immediately.
Vincent,
For a while, a lot of people were willing to treat mass as a first principle. The “reason” we need the Higgs to provide mass to particles comes from the weak force. The theory that describes the weak force best requires a massless force carrier, but in the world we see only massive carriers of the weak force. The solution, essentially, is that the weak force carriers are “born” massless and are given mass by interactions with the Higgs.
Also, we know that not all particles exclusively occupy space. Bosons (force carriers) can occupy space in large numbers – this is part of the basis for lasers. Even massive bosons can do this.
I would like to know what is the reason why particles should need to be given mass (by way of interaction with a Higgs field)? Why shouldn’t we just suppose that as a First Principle that particles (in order to be conceptually different from empty space and for a satisfing theory of knowledge) that they a priori have mass/inertia and occupy space to the exclusion of other particles? It seems to me that conceptually all motion should be of things that have mass.
I do agree that photons do have zero rest mass, but then photons are never found to be at rest and if they were they couldn’t possibly be weighed. So I’m saying don’t all things that move have mass? How would it be possible to say that something can move and not have mass?
Please see Lev Okun’s “The Concept of Mass,” Physics Today, June 1989, pp. 31-6, excerpts:
In the modern language of relativity theory there is only one mass, the Newtonian mass m, which does not vary with velocity; hence the famous formula E=mc² has to be taken with a large grain of salt. … The notion of the dependence of mass on velocity was introduced by Lorentz in 1899 and then developed by him and others in the years preceding Einstein’s formulation of special relativity in 1905, as well as in later years. The basis of this notion is again the application of the nonrelativistic formula p=mv in the relativistic region, where (as we know now) this formula is not valid.
Also see Okun’s reply in the Letters column, “Putting to Rest Mass Misconceptions,” Physics Today, May 1990, pp. 13-4, 115, 117. And, Carl G. Adler’s paper “Does mass really depend on velocity, dad?” Am. J. Phys., August 1987.
Ironically, you quote Okun. Everything I say on this site is precisely consistent with Okun’s view; he convinced me. It’s you who don’t understand what he meant.
It is absolutely not true that things must have mass in order to move. It is quite the reverse; things must have mass in order to stop!
prof a question perennially bugs me is why particle phy equations & math behind it is so so complicated..why cant they be simple like F=ma..or I=V/R or ,,E =MC^2..JUS WHY.
mervins: yours is the best blog question ever. First, the equations you quote are really definitions. You need to convince yourself of that before going further.
On the contrary, shouldn’t it bother you why anything is simple? Look how complicated is the world around you; clouds, storms, trees, bodies, brains. I myself am impressed at how relatively simple the equations are — simple enough that humans can figure some of them out.
The only reason any of the equations we learn in school are simple is that very complicated equations can effectively become simpler if you apply the complicated equations in simple enough situations. And it’s not surprising that the first equations humans figured out, historically, were simple ones… it took a long time, many experiments and a lot of thinking to figure out that there were more complicated ones hiding behind the simple ones.
There is a thing that still perplexes me:
Ordinary particles interact via messenger particles (the photon, the W+- and Zº and the gluons), but the Higgs particle(s) seem (at least watching the Feynmann diagrams commonly used) to interact with every kind of particle directly, without the mediation of a messenger particle.
How is that possible?
The Higgs is itself a “messenger particle,” a boson like every particle in your list. It’s a little funky because it’s spin-0 instead of spin-1, but it’s certainly no fermion. Does it confuse you that the Higgs can interact with both bosons (W, Z) and fermions? The W and photon interact, so boson-boson interactions are not unique to the Higgs at all. Or that it can interact with itself? So can gluons.
I thought this at first too, but if it were the case, the Higgs interaction would not be a “fifth force” (in addition to electromagnetism, weak force, strong force and gravity) that make right-handed and left-handed fermions interact, making the “higgs interaction” some kind of “left-right-ness force”?
@From Peru
I can’t fully parse your comment. The Higgs is not usually called a fifth force because it is not a gauge field, but it certainly produces an additional force / interaction between particles.
This is confusing because the concept of a “force” and “force-carrying” or “messenger” particle is poorly defined, kinda like the definition of a continent or planet. For example, in Compton scattering, a photon bouncing off an electron, the electron field mediates the interaction between the electron and photon. Does this mean that the electron is a force carrier and we in fact have more than 4 fundamental forces? Not really. It means that the division of the world into force carriers and matter particles is not meaningful (a division by spin is more meaningful), and that you should look to the Lagrangian for what interactions “should be” possible, not to a dubious classification scheme.
This is a very well-written answer; I haven’t tried dealing with this subtlety on this website anywhere.
Well said.
Welcome to Waterloo!
I was wondering if video recording will be streaming at the current time of your lecture?
Best,