Okay...let me start with the disclaimer that I've never taken a physics course in my life. Not even high school. That said...if I understand the conception of the Higgs boson as the particle mediator of the Higgs field, which in turn imbues particles with the property of mass, isn't that analogous to electrons acting as the mechanism of an electric field? Which would suggest that there would be ways to manipulate the Higgs field in a given region to increase or decrease mass, just as an electric field can be externally manipulated.
I guess what I'm asking is, is this going to make Mass Effect look really, really prescient or is there some key component I'm missing here that would essentially make it impossible to manipulate the Higgs field?
Alright, so, let's address this. To your first question mark; sort of. The mediator for the electromagnetic field is the photon, not the electron (think light/x-rays/microwaves/radiowaves/gamma radiation).
First, a little crash course in photons (I did quantum physics 301 and 401 as part of my undergrad degree in nanotech, but that was a few years back, so I'm a touch rusty). You can think of a photon as a little bunch of waves in the electric and magnetic field; it's sort of a wave, because it's made up of lots of waves that constructively and destructively interfere. But it's also sort of a particle, because most of those waves will cancel out except at one spot, so it has a discrete location. Because they have an energy then from e=mc^2 they have a mass and, with their velocity, a momentum.
Now, you can observe real photons; discrete wave-packets of light, that for example get sent from a lightbulb or a laser. They have actually been emitted, and can be intercepted in between targets for example, they exist for a long time.
However, there are also virtual photons, photons which exist on timescales so short that we can't specifically say they have existed at all. All we can see is that some interaction has taken place (for example, between two atoms bumping into each other), but we can't look close enough or fast enough to actually see what happened, we can only look at the aftermath. You can see the atoms have each changed energy and direction by the discrete amount, let's say that one atom has lost momentum k and energy e, while the other has gained that much.
So, if you wanted to write this out, you could explain what happened in terms of one atom emitting a photon of momentum k and energy e, that then was absorbed by the other atom. In that sense, a photon has mediated the interaction.
Wiki has a good article on it, scroll down to the bit about Feynmann diagrams for probably the clearest visual.
(Now, that example was pretty much the simplest case, you can get all sorts of weird things like particles emitting virtual photons that interact with themselves, or particles appearing from nowhere. Annnyway...)
Now, photons and the Higg's aren't exactly the same. Photons can have any range of energy above the Planck energy, and have no rest energy as such. The Higg's is a little heftier; it actually has a rest energy/mass (thanks to e=mc^2, they're pretty well interchangeable in QM), so we have that value of 125 odd GeV (one eV = energy gained by an electron accelerating across 1 Volt of potential or ~ 1.6*10^-19 J. Thus, even 125 GeV isn't much energy on our macrosopic scale).
However, just as with photons, there are still interactions which are mediated by the Higg's, that happen very very fast. So fast, the particle may not actually have come into existence, but can still have an effect. Because quantum. These interactions are what give us mass. They are ripples in the Higg's field (which, since that is everywhere, is basically saying the the fabric of the universe). These interactions happen constantly.
Now, if we have a discrete boson, you could in theory produce an identical boson, which is shifted by exactly half a wavelength. Much as with destructive interference in sound, this would cancel out the original Higg's. HOWEVER, the problem is, we aren't dealing with real Higg's in everyday mass.
They flicker in and out (and don't, at the same time; like I said, quantum) constantly.
There is no way we could produce our own bosons to cancel them; we can't measure them, so we don't know their direction.
We can't produce them fast enough, or with enough control over the energies.
Even if we could (which we can't!), the apparatus that would do so would be generating it's own virtual Higg's constantly.
Basically, you'd need sensors and accelerators for
every subatomic particle with mass.
Re; the light discussion. Light has no rest mass. It has got a momentum. However, if you calculate backwards using their known speed, and their momentum, you end up with zero mass if you use the correct equations. You can't go faster than light, as that would violate causality, irrespective of the energy required.
Not sure (not my field of expertise), but from what I've heard, the general consensus is if some other particle has no mass, it will automatically be travelling at light speed. Fine. Great. It will also be completely frozen in time from it's own perspective. As far as a photon is concerned, even if it travelled the entire length of the universe, no time has passed since it's creation. Zip. Nada.
Re: Blackholes, no-one says the whole hole is infintely small (the event horizon is the bit that grows, and is the limit of the observable universe). They refer instead to the singularity. Which actually still has some dimension, if the black hole has charge/spins.
Anyway, ninjas. Blargh. Will be back later.
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Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 516088 times)