Theos-Talk Archives (November 2000 Message tt00016)

" The Higgs Mechanism Imagine a cocktail party of political party 
workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking 
to their nearest neighbors. The ex-Prime Minister enters  and 
crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighborhood are 
strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves 
she attracts the people she comes  close to, while the ones she 
has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of 
people always clustered around her she acquires a greater 
mass than normal,  that is she has more momentum for the 
same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is 
hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving  
again because the clustering process has to be restarted.  In 
three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is 
the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a 
background field is invented which  becomes locally distorted 
whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the 
clustering of the field around the particle - generates the 
particle's mass. The idea  comes directly from the physics of 
solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid 
contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an  
electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, 
causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times 
bigger than the mass of a free electron.  The postulated Higgs 
field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our 
Universe."

I've read also the Higgs bosom is "a vibrating chunk of the 
unseen vacuum that underlies everything in the universe"... 
sounds occult to me!

- Art

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