Neil deGrasse Tyson's favorite science joke

Originally posted by adam warlock
The Higgs is a fundamental particle and it doesn't get its mass form the Higgs mechanism.

Also my point was, and it's a good thing you mentioned gluons in your post, that most of normal particles mass doesn't come from the Higgs mechanism. For instance if the Higgs didn't exist protons would still have more than 90% of their mass would still exist du ...[text shortened]... iggs boson being responsible for the existence of mass in our Universe is just that: a nonsense.

I don't really think that the quadratic term in the unbroken Higgs Lagrangian counts as a mass term, since it has the wrong sign and would correspond to imaginary mass. What do you want an explanation of the Higgs mechanism for anyway? Given that most of the mass of hadrons comes from the chiral anomaly you should be explaining that.

For things like the top quark the Higgs generated mass would dominate over the chiral one if it lasted long enough to form a composite. There's an interesting question regarding why all the Higgs couplings are different.

The vacuum state of the Higgs field corresponds to a non-zero field and the other fields in the standard model couple with it. This coupling creates mass like terms in the effective Lagrangian.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I don't really think that the quadratic term in the unbroken Higgs Lagrangian counts as a mass term, since it has the wrong sign and would correspond to imaginary mass. What do you want an explanation of the Higgs mechanism for anyway? Given that most of the mass of hadrons comes from the chiral anomaly you should be explaining that.

For things like ...[text shortened]... andard model couple with it. This coupling creates mass like terms in the effective Lagrangian.

I don't think that for people understand where mass comes from ordinary matter we really need to go to chiral anomaly. At least I know how to "explain" it and I don't need to resort to chiral anomaly.

The thing is the a lot of people think that mass comes from particles interacting with the Higgs Boson. This is simply not true. And it is not true on two ways. The first way is that elementary particles (excluding the Higgs boson) get their mass from interacting with the Higgs field (more to the point: it is due to the interaction with a field whose average value is non-zero). The second way that it is wrong is that ordinary matter gets most of its mass due to other mechanisms which are not related with the Higgs mechanism.

Originally posted by adam warlock
I don't think that for people understand where mass comes from ordinary matter we really need to go to chiral anomaly. At least I know how to "explain" it and I don't need to resort to chiral anomaly.

The thing is the a lot of people think that mass comes from particles interacting with the Higgs Boson. This is simply not true. And it is not true on ...[text shortened]... er gets most of its mass due to other mechanisms which are not related with the Higgs mechanism.

1) Are you claiming that the bulk of the mass of hadrons is not due to the chiral anomaly?

2) Do you think the mass of the effective Higgs is the same as for the fundamental Higgs?

Originally posted by Suzianne
A Higgs boson walks into a church, and the priest says, 'I'm sorry we don't allow Higgs bosons to come to churches.' And the Higgs says, 'But without me, you can't have mass.'




My apologies if this has been posted before.

Reminds me of this joke:

A neutron walks into a bar and asks how much for a drink, bartender says, "for you, no charge!"

Originally posted by DeepThought
1) Are you claiming that the bulk of the mass of hadrons is not due to the chiral anomaly?

2) Do you think the mass of the effective Higgs is the same as for the fundamental Higgs?

1) No.
2) No.

Edit: Let me try to ask a few ridiculous questions of my own:
1) Are you saying that if the Higgs mechanism wouldn't exist there would be no mass in the Universe?
2) Are you saying that the Higgs boson mass comes from the Higgs boson interaction with the Higgs mechanism?

Originally posted by adam warlock
1) No.
2) No.

Edit: Let me try to ask a few ridiculous questions of my own:
1) Are you saying that if the Higgs mechanism wouldn't exist there would be no mass in the Universe?
2) Are you saying that the Higgs boson mass comes from the Higgs boson interaction with the Higgs mechanism?

In that case how do you intend to explain the mass of Hadrons without reference to the chiral anomaly?

1) That's not a simple question. It depends on whether weak SU(2) breaking is important to the formation of the <ud> condensate.

2) Yes.

Originally posted by DeepThought
In that case how do you intend to explain the mass of Hadrons without reference to the chiral anomaly?

1) That's not a simple question. It depends on whether weak SU(2) breaking is important to the formation of the <ud> condensate.

2) Yes.

In that case how do you intend to explain the mass of Hadrons without reference to the chiral anomaly?

Good thing someone has finally bite the bullet. Later on I'll post my layman explanation of mass and where it comes from on this audience.

1) It is not a simple question, but it does have an answer. From what we currently know we wouldn't be in the Universe to say it is so, but yes there would be mass on the Universe.
2) I actually missed a word on my question. It should have been: "Are you saying that the Higgs boson mass comes solely from the Higgs boson interaction with the Higgs mechanism?". With that extra word the answer is no.

PS: my later post will touch on all of these questions.