A gentle plea: will all science journalists please cease and desist from referring to the Higgs boson as "the God particle"? Nothing that emerges from a particle accelerator is going to be "the God" anything, and using the term loosely only sells copy at the expense of confusing the public as to what awesome places like CERN actually do.
There. Think that will work?
Not a chance, I know . . . especially now that we are closing in on the confirming the existence of said particle, and from independent research teams. Twin groups working at the LHC have found "data spikes" near the expected range (that's somewhere between 114 and 185 GeV at the outside, for those in the know). Computing error, twice? Maybe; it could be an "error in the model background" itself. But that most hyperbolically named particle is going to be everywhere in the news, if and when these experiments bear mass-producing fruit.
Speaking of which, there's a funny moment in Steven Weinberg's "Dreams of a Final Theory" (which I know you appreciate, Tom Ray; thanks, by the way, for your many kind comments on this blog) in which he relates his experience in trying to get Congress to fund the SSC. At one point a Representative from Illinois (sitting on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology) asks of the Supercollider, " . . . will this make us find God?" . . . because, "If this machine does that, I am going to come around and support it." Weinberg dryly quips, "I had enough sense to stay out of this exchange."
Weinberg himself is almost laconic about the Higgs, since--valid enough point, though it takes a theoretical physicist to think this way--it is the easiest solution to the Standard Model, making a "find" more on the order of expected confirmation than actual discovery.
Quote:
"Because the Higgs boson is really required by the simplest version of the theory that unifies the weak and electromagnetic forces, it's very likely to be discovered.
The theory has other versions which would lead to the discovery of other kinds of particles, the so-called technicolor particles.
"We have a fair degree of certainty that one or the other of those, and very likely the Higgs boson, will be discovered. In fact, it's so likely that we already anticipate it, so it probably won't get us anything new. What we really need is something that we don't anticipate."
At the same time, there's no need to *downplay* the Higgs--as I have also seen some do who, like me, cringe at its metaphysically overstated moniker. The Higgs, if it indeed exists, is indeed a big deal. The issue of ruling Asgard aside, this is the particle that confers mass on . . . well, on everything that has mass. Without the Higgs, one assumes, the cosmos would be a haze of radiant energy.
Which raises an interesting hypothetical issue. (A layman's thoughts follow; QCD or GR folks, feel free to dive in.)
In a hypothetical universe devoid of the Higgs field, all particles would have zero rest mass; the universe would be spacetime and energy. That's odd enough to picture--14 billion light years with nothing massive in it, from neutrons to neutron stars. But something weirder seems to follow. It strikes me that, without the Higgs, there would be no perspective by which time is moving.
Special Relativity gets us there. One can't posit an inertial reference frame "seated on a photon," as no clock or yardstick can meaningfully be constructed, but play along for a moment (as that's just the point). From a "photon's frame of reference," if you will, the entire universe is motionless in time. It's all moving at speed C in the other direction, dilating the relative progression of its clock to nada.
Thanks to the Lorentz Contraction, from the photon's perspective the universe also has zero extension in the direction of motion. (Which is the only direction that has meaning to a photon, so to speak; whether it exists in a "2-d universe" or not can be discussed.) Wherever, from our perspective, the photon is headed--from its own perspective, it's already there, and has "always" been there, because there was no distance to cover. Let's say the universe is finite but unbounded, but you have to get to 100 billion parsecs to start to make out the grand curvature. Doesn't make any difference; that photon has "already" completed its journey, all the way around to its starting place. Indeed, in the frozen timeless instant, there was no journey to complete, because the Lorentz pulled that entire unbounded cosmos, no matter its volume, down to a point.
If everything in the universe moves at C, no inertial state exists even in principle that "experiences" either the flow of time or the extension of space. In principle it would still exist, we might say--imagining the universe, perhaps, as a giant empty box through which massless particles are "really" moving at finite speeds. But there is no "really" view on spacetime; only locally inertial frames and spacetime coincidences. Newton's model of time, "passing equably without relation to anything external," is incorrect. And if there are no reference frames in which time moves--anywhere--surely it is pedantic to say that time "really" is running.
Zero time factor; zero spatial expansion; the whole universe a point of infinite energy, from every possible frame. That certainly seems equivalent to "singularity." Without at least one sub-C particle, it isn't clear (to me, anyway) what meaning can be attached to the notion of spacetime expansion.
Higgs Boson--Author of Time?
Higgs Boson--Particle That Caused the Bang? Maybe we do need a more impressive moniker, after all.