Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Would the Universe be different with a zero Higgs field?

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Daniel and Jorge explore how the Higgs field shapes our Universe and what it would be like to live without it.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Smoky Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com, and remember, Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the ad council. Hey, Daniel, how's the Daniel and Jorge food truck going? Can we expect to see it on a street corner anytime soon? Not yet. We still need a few things. We're missing a menu and a chef. Oh, and a vehicle.

I mean, our food truck is just missing the food and the truck? Yeah, that's right, because I've been working on the special particle physics twist that we're going to be offering. Oh, sounds tantalizing. Is it like some kind of interesting flavor fusion or some weird quirky flavors? It's a special device to suck out all of the Higgs bosons from your food so you can eat it without gaining any mass. Whoa, that would be massive. It's not something we take lightly. You should give that some heavy thinking first. Hi, I'm sorry.

a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. And I wonder what a bowl of Higgs bosons would taste like. Well, don't we eat a bowl of Higgs bosons anytime we eat a bowl of anything? Yeah, there are Higgs bosons in everything we eat. But I want a pure dose of Higgs's. You know, what is their inherent flavor? Wouldn't be kind of a heavy meal, though? It would probably make me heavier, that's for sure. Well, yeah, usually eating a bowl of anything will give you a lot of calories. Unless it's a of antimatter. That'll make you literally lighter. Oh, it would make you explode, wouldn't it? A teaspoon of antimatter. We make your whole town explode. Yeah. And it would annihilate your

appetite. Well, I'm anti-exploding your town. So you might want to think about other ways to annihilate your appetite. Is that only because we live in basically the same town? Exactly. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we enjoy the flavor of the universe, both the main course, of everything that science has unraveled about the way the universe works and our mysterious cosmos operates, as well as the spicy side dish of confusion of everything that we don't yet understand about the universe. It's a delicious place to live and to be curious and just to wonder about how everything works. That's right. We serve up bowls fulls of amazing science here talking about the universe and the cosmos and everything in it,

ready for you to scoop up and feed your mind and your soul with everything. amazing knowledge about everything that is. And as we chew on that, everything we understand and don't about the universe, you might wonder, why does the universe taste this way and not some other way? Is it possible for the universe to have been different? If we ran the whole experiment again from the Big Bang, would we end it with basically the same thing? Or were there some random twists and turns that determined the fate of our universe and might have set it on another course? Yeah, it is a very peculiar universe, pretty interesting. And, especially because of the fact that we're in it.

We had a lot of spice to the universe, I think. And so you got to wonder, like, if the universe was any different, would we still be here? It's a deep question of philosophy and one that's inspired by specific discoveries we've made about particle physics. As we look out at the universe and pull it apart and try to understand what its little bits are and how they work, we notice a lot of sort of specific details about how things work. Particles have these specific masses. They follow all these very specific rules. And we don't always understand why they follow those rules

or have those particular values or interactions and whether those things are arbitrary or if they have to be that way. Yeah, if it seems like the universe is the way it is because of some random reason, I guess you've got to wonder like, what if it was different? What if the universe looked and felt

and worked in a slightly different way? Would there still be food trucks? There will always be food trucks. I think their inevitability of evolution. Well, they only became hip and popular, maybe like 10 years ago. I don't know. I don't go out often enough to know what's hip and popular on the streets. But I think it's an extension of a question.

Everybody asks themselves. I mean, we know that the probability of you in particular being here is tiny. Just for like the chances of your parents having met and coming together at just the moment for you to be born is astronomical. On top of that, the probability for humans to have evolved and for Earth. to have formed and for our galaxy to be right here on top of all of that stuff is an even deeper layer of questioning about reality about whether the very rules of the universe have to be this way and whether they could be another way add that to the probabilities for

you to exist and the whole thing just dwarfs you and makes you feel like you are so unlikely it's amazing that you're here it is amazing that we're here although I do try to think about the moment of my conception the least amount possible something I like to put a lot of thought in, but it is interesting to think about the conception of the universe and how it came to be and what made it the way it is right now. Yeah, and something we know very little about. We've discovered all these rules that particles follow, but we don't know if those values are set randomly, as you suggested, or if there's some deeper set of rules that requires them to have these values.

It's just the only universe we've ever studied, and so we don't have other examples to inform us. And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Would the universe be different with a zero Higgs field? I would certainly be involved in fewer Nobel Prize winning discoveries. Wait, what do you mean? Well, just in the sense that I wouldn't be here if the Higgs field was zero. Oh, I see. That's right.

Yeah, the discovery of the, or I guess the confirmation of the Higgs field and the discovery of the Higgs boson that won a Nobel Prize. And you were sort of involved in that project, right? I was involved in the project from the experimental side. Like we demonstrated the Higgs field is there and we produced the Higgs boson and saw it and studied it. We, of course, didn't win the Nobel Prize for that. Our discovery confirmed the theoretical ideas and those theorists all won the Nobel Prize for it. Though there was a lot of really interesting sort of political jockeying for the Nobel Prize.

I'm not sure if everybody out there appreciates sort of like how personal and political the process of choosing people for the Nobel Prize is. There's some really interesting stories there. I think we all appreciate some gossip. Spill the beans. Who backstaffed who with the Nobel Prize in the living room? Well, the issue is that they can give the Nobel Prize to up to three people. That's, of course, the rule from Nobel's will. And so everybody knew Higgs was going to be on the list.

But the question was who else got a share of the Nobel Prize? And there were two other folks that were sort of high in the running, but then one of them passed away before we actually discovered the Higgs field. Suspiciously That is so suss This is not a true crime podcast Or maybe it could be What were the circumstances

Of this person's demise We're not going to dig into that But it did leave an opening Because you cannot win the Nobel Prize posthumously If you passed away, you can't win it So there was a third slot there And it wasn't clear who should get that third slot So all of a sudden all the theorists

Who had been involved in the Higgs boson theoretical frameworks, started giving a bunch of seminars about their role in these pivotal developments, essentially campaigning for that third spot. Oh, I thought you were going to say that all the scientists involved in the Higgs discovery suddenly started to mysteriously disappear or pass away. No, this is not a true crime podcast. It's also not a paranormal activities podcast. They didn't all like disappear into ghosts or anything like that.

But, you know, when everybody realized, ooh, there's sort of a third slot available for who's going to share the Nobel Prize. for the Higgs boson, a lot of people started to publicly make the case that they should get that third share. Wow. Like they put out ads saying like for your consideration, me, for best supporting scientists in a Higgs field discovery. It's exactly the particle physics version of that. People started putting papers in the archive, you know, a historical retrospective on the discovery of the Higgs boson highlighting their role in it, for example, giving a lot of public talks about this kind of stuff, you know, sort of wink wink, wink, not, not remember. I'm very important

because in the end, the Nobel Prize is decided by people, for people, about people. It's political like everything else. Yeah, but I bet if the scientists suddenly started disappearing or dying under mysterious synchronisms, fewer people would put their names out there. I don't know, maybe it would make it even more mysterious and attractive to people. Well, this is not a true crime podcast. This is a true science podcast, but it is kind of interesting. to think about the Higgs boson discovery and how significant it was, right? Because discovering the Higgs field sort of confirmed the last bit of the standard model, which is the part that gives things mass. It's really an incredible punctuation mark on a centuries-long story. You know, when

Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism, it was an incredible moment in theoretical physics because it took two pieces of mathematics and recognized it like both of them were incomplete but in complementary ways. It's like he saw two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. and realized that ones fit perfectly inside the other. That was beautiful. But then Higgs, 100 years later, realized that this new joint piece, electricity and magnetism, fit perfectly with the weak force in exactly the same way, except there was one piece missing. So he was able to join these things together and recognize like the outline of a new missing piece,

which of course is the Higgs field, which we then discovered. So it's really an incredible story of how, like, mathematics has shown us the path to insight into the very nature of the universe. Yeah, I know for sure. I mean, where would physics be without math? I mean, you kind of owe everything to math, right? And also engineers to make your experiments. Yeah, and cooks and plumbers and everything else.

And food trucks. We stand on the shoulders of basically everybody. Yeah, it is an amazing discovery in the end of a long road of exploring what the universe is made out of. But like you said, it's so significant this Higgs field because sort of gives things mass, or at least that's the common perception of it, that it kind of makes you wonder, like, what would happen if there was no Higgs field or the Higgs field was zero? Yeah, because the Higgs field is different from every other field we have found.

You know, the electron field, the quark fields, all these are fields that fill space. They can like wiggle in ways that we see as particles. But the Higgs field is different from all of those fields because it has so much more energy sort of like stuck inside of it. Instead of relaxing down to zero like everything else did when the universe cooled, it sort of like got stuck on a shelf. And that really changes the very nature of our universe. Yeah. Well, in this podcast, we like to ask a lot of what if questions. Right.

Danny, I think we've had episodes about like, what if the Earth's gravity suddenly turned off? Or what if we didn't have electrons or right? Big questions about how the universe might or could be different. Yeah, these are fun mental games. Not only because it lets us think about other universes and what they might be like, but because it helps us understand the role of everything, how they all come together to make the symphony of our reality. Yeah, I mean, I guess you can ask like, what would life be like without food trucks?

And that kind of tells you a little bit more about how significant they are. If you can even call that living. What's life without tacos at 2 a.m., right? Probably healthier, actually, longer and healthier. Well, today we're asking the question of whether the universe would be different and how would it be different if the Higgs field were zero. That big discovery had never occurred or even go back to the beginning of the universe. what if the universe started without a Higgs field?

And so as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question and wonder what a Higgs-less life would be like. So thanks very much to everybody who volunteered for this segment of the podcast. We really enjoy hearing your thoughts. And we'd like to hear your thoughts in particular. We're talking to you, a listener who has never volunteered.

Please don't be shy. Write to us to questions at danielandhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. What do you think would happen if the universe's Higgs field was zero. It's what people had to say. So I only know about the Higgs field through your show, and I only think I heard it once or twice.

I'm not entirely sure, but I'm guessing it's some kind of energy, and if it was zero, I'm guessing the universe would be nothing. If the Higgs field was zero, then I guess we will be all a soup of energy. Well, I do know that the Higgs field is responsible for giving particles mass, and without it, then particles in the universe would not feel the

effects of gravity if they didn't have mass. And without the effects of gravity, things wouldn't clump together. So, you know, we wouldn't have stars. We wouldn't have galaxies. I guess after the Big Bang, it would be just the soup. I think this has something to do with false vacuum and the destruction of the universe. Given that the Higgs boson is responsible for giving particles mass, my assumption is that if the Higgs field was zero, then it would be not possible for particles to have mass, and therefore gravitational effects would not work in a universe where the Higgs field is zero. Well, if I understand it right, the Higgs field transfers mass to particles.

So if it didn't do that, the particles would have no mass, which means they would. wouldn't attract each other and it would just be flying around at the speed of light. So I guess the universe would just be like a big mist. I mean, there would be no clumping, there would be no aggregation, everything would just be like flying around and would just be like a big fog or even not just nothing. Because there's no mass, there's no attraction. So there you have it. I think if the Higgs field was zero, the universe would either look incredible.

boring and nothing could or would happen. Or the opposite that the universe would become incredibly chaotic and out of control very quickly, rather like a maths class on the substitute maths teachers first day. I guess the Higgs field is that thing that gives stuff mass. So if there is no way to have mass, there would be essentially no gravity, I guess. Yes. Things would probably be very smooth, then, not clumped together as much. All right. Not a lot of happy answers here. Nobody wants to live in that universe, it sounds like. I'm just disappointed. Nobody said that without the Higgs field, you couldn't get Higgy with it.

Would we even have Will Smith without the Higgs field? Right. That's the big question. It'd be like a slap in the face to the universe. Too soon? All right. He's the fresh prints of particle physics after all. Well, this is an interesting question. What would the universe be like or would the universe be different if the Higgs field were zero? So let's dig into this question, Daniel.

We talked a little bit about the Higgs boson and the discovery, but how do physicists define the Higgs field? How can we understand what it is? Our modern concept of like what space is from a quantum mechanical perspective involves basically a bunch of quantum fields. So imagine empty space out there. It's never really empty. When a particle moves through that space, it's really, just like a ripple in some quantum field. And these quantum fields fill the whole universe. There's one for every kind of particle that's out there. The deepest question is like, why do we

have these fields? Why do they exist? How many different kind of fields are there? And the answer is we just don't know. We've observed these fields. We've found them. We've been able to describe them mathematically using wave equations. So we think they wiggle the same way that like water in your bathtub wiggles or in a similar way at least. And so the name of the game is like hunting out these fields, how many fields are there? And the Higgs field is just one of those fields that's out there. But it's also quite different from the other fields. You know, particles which are excitations of the Higgs field don't have any spin, which makes them very different from every other kind of particle we have seen. Electrons and photons, they all have some kind of spin. Higgs bosons don't have any

spin. But just to maybe clarify for people, you say there are other fields and basically like we're wiggles in fields, right? Like every particle out there, including the ones that we're made out of are there because there are fields for it, right? Like there's an electron field that permeates the entire universe and that's where electrons come from. But it's also the same for like quarks, right? Quarks would make protons and neutrinos. Everything has a field, basically. That's right, exactly.

Every particle is just a ripple in this field. And that sort of like unifies all the particles. Like you might think about one electron and another electron is totally separate particles. You can also think of them as two different ripples in the same field. There's one electron field that fills the whole universe. And the whole concept of a field might sound sort of weird and abstract and hard to get your head around. But it's really just like a number for every point in space. Everywhere in space, you can have a number.

And maybe that number is zero or maybe that number is 10. In this case, it's like the value of the field. And as you put energy into that field, it can oscillate and wiggle in a way that looks like a particle. Also, all of space is like embedded with all of these quantum fields. Again, we don't know why. This is just our description. of the universe we have observed.

And the Higgs field is different from all those fields because it interacts with those fields in a special way. It connects with them and changes how particles move through the other fields in just the way so as to make those fields look like they have mass. So the electron flies through the universe, but it also interacts with the Higgs field and that changes how the electron particle moves through its field in just the same way as if the electron itself had mass.

So the Higgs field sort of changes what we think mass is. Instead of like the amount of stuff in a little particle, now we think of it as like how strongly the Higgs field changes how those ripples move through other fields. Yeah, it's pretty amazing to think sometimes I sit down and I, you know, can I imagine my body and all the atoms that my hands and my arms and my legs are made out of. Pretty amazing to imagine each one of those atoms as being, you know, a collection of electrons. Each of those electrons is just being like little ripples, like little wiggles in the some sort of universe field. It's pretty tribut to think about. Yeah. And it connects you with all

the other electrons in the universe, right? You know, like why are all electrons the same? Really, because they're all just ripples in the same field. It's like we're all sharing one huge blanket, you know, instead of having our own little blankets. Yeah, we're all connected, man. But then you're saying the Higgs field is another field that is all around this, but it doesn't make up matter, does it? Like there's no stuff made out of Higgs bosons. So a lot of the fields create particles that are stable, like the electron field. You can have stuff that just sits there. The electron can sit there for an infinite amount of time and just exist.

The Higgs field can also create particles. So the Higgs boson is what happens when you excite the Higgs field and you get a particle. But that particle isn't stable. Like if you have a Higgs boson sitting in empty space, it will very quickly turn into other particles. So there's no stable matter made out of Higgs bosons. So yeah, you can't like build stuff out of Higgs bosons because it'll just fall apart. Okay, so then the Higgs field is there, and you're saying it's sort of main effect is that it gives other particles from other fields the feeling of mass, right, or the behavior that feels like mass, and specifically the idea of mass as it relates to movement, right? Yeah, we're talking about inertial mass here.

We're talking about how much force it takes to get something to accelerate, right? Force equals mass times acceleration. what that mass term really means is it tells you how to relate the force and the acceleration. How much of a force do you need in order to get something to accelerate? If you're pushing on the earth, it has a huge mass. It takes a really big force. If you're pushing on a leaf, it is a tiny mass. So a little force can give you a pretty good acceleration.

So that's the mass we're talking about. And where does that mass come from? We don't really know. It's sort of like a measure of how much energy is stored inside something. So particles can have energy stored inside of the. them because they interact with the Higgs field. Like the electron is truly at its core a massless particle, but it interacts with the Higgs field. And that gives it this like internal stored energy, which gives it inertia.

And that's what we call mass. That's what we call mass due to the Higgs field, right? And so like the earth is really massive. And if I try to push in it, it'd be really hard to get it to move. And so that's an effect of the Higgs field. It's like it's trying to push the earth, but the Higgs field is saying like, no, this thing has a lot of mass. I'm not going to let it move a lot. Yeah, that's right. But remember, as you just pointed out, the Higgs field is one way things can get mass. Mass is really just a measure of

internal stored energy. So if you take, for example, a proton, the particles that make it up, the quarks, they do have some mass from the Higgs field, but most of the mass of the proton is from its other internal stored energy, from the bonds between those corks, which come from the gluon. So most of the mass of the proton and the neutron, and therefore you and me and the earth doesn't actually come from the Higgs field. It comes from the internal stored energy in protons and neutrons. It comes from the strong force. So there's lots of different ways to get internal stored energy and the Higgs field is one of them. So wait, so like a proton has a lot of mass because of the energy that binds the quarks in it. And that is somehow what makes it hard to move

through the universe? Is there a mechanism for that? That's not something we understand very well. Like why do things have inertia when they have energy inside of them? You know, it's sort of weird to think about like you take a box that has no mass and you put photons inside of it. Those photons have no mass. But now that you've stored those photons inside the box, the box now has mass because you have internal stored energy. So you can put massless stuff inside a massless box and get a massive box. Mass is a really weird thing. It's this property of stored energy that it has inertia. And the stored inertia kind of mass doesn't have anything to do with the Higgs field is what you're saying. The Higgs field only.

kind of affects the mass of individual particles. Yeah, it's one way you can store energy inside a particle. Like electron has internal stored energy due to its interactions with the Higgs field. It's like using the energy of the Higgs field and capturing a little bit of that energy. And that's what gives it some inertia. But yeah, most of the sort of internal stored energy of a proton and neutron doesn't come from the Higgs field. So like if I have a proton, which has quarks in it, most of the mass of a proton is not due to the Higgs field then, like only a very little amount of it. So I guess that makes you wonder if the

Hicksfield were zero, would it even matter? Would it change really the mass of a proton and everything, how everything else works in the universe? Let's get into that question. What do it mean for the universe and for food trucks everywhere? But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy

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All right, we're playing what if, which is a pretty popular genre I feel like right now. Have you seen that what-if show on Disney Plus? I have seen some of that show, and I've read Randall Monroe's two excellent what-if books. So there's a lot of fun what-ifing out there, yeah. So we're asking, what if the Higgs field were zero? What if instead of a universe where the Hicksfield wasn't zero, we lived in a universe where the Hicksfield was zero, zero or like gone altogether? And we're talking about if it were zero rather than if it were gone altogether.

Because, you know, one thing the other fields can do is they can relax down to basically almost zero. Like you can have space with basically no electrons in it, right? That means the electron field is going down to its minimum value. Of course, it's a quantum field, so it's always going to have some energy stored in it. Maybe you can break that down for us a little bit. Like what does it mean for a field to be zero or not zero or to have energy in it? Like it's a field. It's something that's not substantial, is it? Is a field something substantial is sort of a big question in philosophy? Like, are fields even real? Or are they just sort of a calculation we do in our heads to try to make predictions from experiments. We don't know. And that could be a whole

hour little digression. But the way the fields work mathematically is that you just sort of think of them as a number or in some cases a vector at every point in space. And that field can have energy, which means that that number can be moving. So fields can have like kinetic energy if they wiggle, like the value of the field is going up and down. They can also have potential energy based on the different kind of field that it is. And so the points in space can sort of be oscillating like the value of the field can be changing and wiggles in the field like that are sort of coherent because the way the field works and it follows the wave equation that energy sort of propagates through the field in a coherent way which is why like a little packet of energy can

move to the field and sort of stay together an electron can move across the universe carrying that packet of energy and not like dissipating out into the universe so like if you say like a field has energy means it has kind of like a wiggle to it like it's pulsating in a way like it's not standing still yeah exactly it's pulsating and because these are quantum fields they have to wiggle in very discrete ways like you can have one electron or two electrons or seven electrons you can't have 1.71 electrons right because it's a quantum field which means it's quantized which means it has like a ladder of possible states not an infinite spectrum the same way you can have like one photon or seven photons, but you can't have one and a half photon. That's because the field knows how to wiggle

in some ways. The same way that like a guitar string, you know, you can wiggle at some notes. It can't wiggle at arbitrary notes because of how you cut off the ends of it. Well, you haven't seen me play a guitar. I can make all kinds of horrible sounds and a guitar. I keep waiting for the first public show of your dad band. Oh yeah, the grateful dads. Shout out to my bandmates again. So the fields can have energy to them and you're saying that the Higgs field has some energy to it whereas all the other fields have zero energy

like the electron field does it have some energy to it? The electron field and all the other fields have relaxed it down to very, very low values essentially down to zero. Remember the history of the universe is one where we are cooling down. We started out very hot and dense.

It was like the center of the sun, lots of energy in all the fields. They're all frothing around to the point where you can't even really think about particles. more like an ocean rather than droplets of water. But as the universe expands, then the energy decreases. It gets diluted and things cool down.

And now we're in a sort of very old, very cold phase of the universe where the fields are mostly zero everywhere. So everything sort of like relaxed down to about zero. But the Higgs field didn't. When the universe was cooling down, the Higgs field got stuck in sort of like a local minimum. You know, things tend to like to flow down to low potential energy the way, like, water will flow down to the bottom of a valley.

But if you have a little lip there, there's like a little divot in the rock, the water will get trapped in that little divot. And that's how you get, like, you know, lakes at 10,000 feet up in the mountains. Because a little valley there that traps it. The Higgs field, when it was relaxing, got stuck in one of those little valleys, and it's still there. Well, I guess maybe my question is, like, when these fields relax at the beginning of the universe, like, where did that energy go? Like, is it because the universe expanded?

it and things got spread out? Or did that energy like go into making electrons or matter? What causes a field to like lose its energy? So it's just because the universe is expanding. And so things are getting more dilute. So the energy just gets more spread out. So instead of having a lot of energy in a small amount of space, now you have the same energy and more space. And so things are just colder and more spread out. And matter gets diluted as space increases by like one over distance cubed, right? The same amount of energy in the matter and now more volume. Radiation, things like photons, gets diluted even more because it's not just that space gets bigger, so you have like more volume with the same amount of energy, but the actual photons themselves get redshifted. So

they cool down even faster than the matter. So as the time goes on from the universe, you have like a radiation dominated portion in the very early universe, and then that radiation falls off very quickly. Then the matter cools down. Now we're actually at a time in the universe where we're dark energy dominated, where most of the energy in the universe is not in radiation or in matter. And that's just because of the expansion of the universe. So when the universe stretched out, all these fields kind of relaxed or they got stretched. I guess they got kind of stretched out. Kind of like you would stretch out a guitar string, right? Like it would lose some of that energy. But somehow the Hicks field didn't lose some of that energy. You're saying like somehow the Hicksfield got stuck with some energy,

but it must have also expanded with the rest of the universe. So why didn't the Higgs field lose that energy with the expansion? So the Higgs field is different from the other fields. In the structure, it's like potential energy. It has a strange sort of potential energy function that has this double dip in it. We have a whole podcast episode about how the Higgs gets mass and its potential energy. We could spend a whole half hour on that. But it's sufficient to know that the Higgs field likes to relax in different ways than the other field.

So it has not just like a potential minimum at zero. it has another potential minimum at a higher value. So it's like the other field, you can think of them as a simple valley where water would flow down to the bottom. The Higgs field is different. It has this like extra little double dip so the water gets stuck at a higher place and can't make it all the way down to the bottom. Sounds like the Higgs field doesn't know how to relax.

Maybe it needs to take some meditation classes or something. Well, you don't want the Higgs field to chill out because the universe would be very different if it did. I see. You like the Higgs being stressed out. I like the universe the way it is, even if that means the Higgs is kind of tense. I guess we could talk about like how, why the Higgs field doesn't relax. But the point is that the Higgs field doesn't relax. And so it has some kind of energy right now.

And is that energy where our mass comes, the mass of small particles comes from? That energy is exactly where the mass of small particles comes from. Like the electron without the Higgs field would be massless. It would travel at the speed of light. It would have no mass. But because the Higgs is there, the electron interacts with it. it and that changes the way the electron moves because it now has this internal energy from its interaction with the Higgs field. The interaction, as you say, comes from the energy of the Higgs field.

What do you mean? Like, can you maybe explain that to us? Like, it has energy and somehow it gives that energy to particles to make them slower or because it has energy, it costs particles more to move through space? What's the connection there? So every kind of particle that we know about, like the electron and the quarks, does that actually two different versions of them. We call them the left-handed version and the right-handed version. And this has to do with like whether their spin is pointed in the same direction they're moving or not. We've talked about it on the podcast several times. You can think about it as chirality or helicity. But there's basically two different versions of every particle, the left-handed

and the right-handed version. And what the Higgs can do is it can turn a left-handed version into a right-handed version. So you have like a left-handed electron flying through space, the Higgs can turn it into a right-handed version and then back and forth, right? So that's what the Higgs can do. And this is happening trillions of times per second if you have a particle flying through space. It's like going back and forth. What? So I have an electron in space. It's spinning one way and the Higgs flips it around? Is that what you're saying? Yes, exactly. The Higgs can flip a left-handed electron into a right-handed electron. Like it knocks it, like it hits it, does it just makes the spin unstable. What's a good way to visualize that or think about why that happens? Is it just because

it's tense and stressed out, it likes to slap electrons around? The way to think about it is that if the universe can do something, then it happens. So when a left-handed electron is flying through space, it can use the Higgs boson to convert into a right-handed electron. It's a possibility. Just the same way an electron can radiate a photon. And so if electron is flying through the universe long enough, then it will happen. This is the kind of thing electrons do. They do everything that they are allowed to do. All the possibilities eventually come to reality. And so left-handed electrons can convert to right-handed electrons and back and forth. And the Higgs boson is what's required to do this. And so essentially the electron that we know and love, what we call the electron, is actually this like

combination of the left-handed electron and the right-hand electron combined with the Higgs boson. You need the Higgs boson there to glue them together. So the electron that we know is sort of like a mishmash of the left-handed electron, the right-handed electron with the Higgs boson there to glue them together into this massive particle. The left-handed electron and the right-hand electron by themselves, neither of them have mass. But the way they move to the universe, constantly flip-flopping back and forth using the Higgs boson, the overall motion of that thing is something that has energy and moves like a particle with mass. You mean like the Higgs boson is why. that causes it to flip back and forth.

And because it's flipping back and forth, it makes it harder to move somehow. And then that's where the mass comes from. Yeah, precisely. The way you can think about like photons flying through empty space go at the speed of light, but photons flying through material, they have to stop and interact with all those atoms.

So they're zigzagging back and forth and the effective speed of that photon is lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. Electron moving through space is interacting with the Higgs field and doing that gives it mass. It doesn't slow it down. It's a different kind of interaction. It changes its internal stored energy

makes this new sort of effective particle. Not a composite particle. It's not that we're talking about how the proton has corks inside of it. We're not saying the electron literally has a left-handed and right-handed particle inside them which click together. This is like a new elementary particle

that is made of these interactions. Where you're saying an electron? it's not really an electron, like an electron is really two half electrons. Well, I'm saying the electron that we know and love and that we eat in our cereal every morning is different from the kinds of electrons we would have in the universe without the Higgs boson. So without the Higgs boson, not only would all these particles be massless, but they would all be split into their left and right-handed versions. And the same is true of every other particle.

Not split, but like each particle would have to decide if it was spinning one way or the other. And it would stay that way. Yes, exactly. they would stay that way and they wouldn't convert. So left-handed electrons would fly through the universe massless at the speed of light and not like flip-flop back and forth to right-handed electrons. So like, I'm an electron in the universe. I'm sitting here or flying around and I'm pointing one way.

But because the Hicks field is there, the Hicks field is like, hey, here's some energy, I guess, or here's a mechanism for you to flip back and forth. And so why not? I flip back and forth 100 trillion times per second. Yeah. So the top cork is more massive. It flips back and forth. more often than the electron, which has less mass than the top corg.

And so that's why top corgs have more mass, because they're more affected by the Higgs boson. It couples to them more tightly. It does this flip-flopping back and forth more often. And it just so happens that this flip-flopping effect is sort of related to how it moves through the universe in a way that it feels like it has inertia. Exactly. You do the calculation for all these interactions and you say, what is it like for this particle to move?

And you get exactly the same effect as if you have. had an elementary particle that really had mass on its own, if it was just like a property of that particle, you get exactly the same equations of motion. So these two massless particles flip-flopping back and forth between each other move in exactly the same way as if you had an elementary particle with its own mass. And so it's all due to this kind of unrelaxed energy that the Higgs field has. And so I guess now we can ask a question, like what if that field was zero? like what if the universe had a Hicksfield that was able to relax, that maybe meditated, took some medication perhaps, chilled out, and went to zero, right?

That's the kind of the question we're asking today. And so the sort of three big effects. Number one is that all these particles would be split. Instead of having left and right-handed particles sort of merge together into the particles we know, we'd have separate versions of everything, as we just talked about. So top left and top right would be different particles instead of being combined together into the massive top sandwich. Wait, what do you mean?

Like, there would still be separate particles that just kind of wouldn't be flipping back and forth. Yeah, well, right now, the top left doesn't exist as its own particle. All right. What we have is the top cork. Top cork is a combination of top left and top right. But a top cork can spin left. A top cork can be left-handed.

There's a bit of a subtle mathematical distinction here between chirality, which is sort of like the nature of the particle mathematically. Is it left-handed or right-handed particle? and Holicity, which is actually talking about the physical spin of the particle. What we're talking about here is more like a quantum mechanical label of these things being left or right-handed. And that has to do with like how the weak force interacts with them. Remember, the weak force only interacts with left-handed particles and not right-handed

particles. And so this is more about that quantum mechanical left-handedness, not the physical spin of the particle. All right. Well, then that's one effect that having a zero-hicks field would have on the universe is that I guess particles like the electron on the top quark would not be flip flophing back and forth. Yeah, exactly. These fermions instead of being combined together into the particles that we know, they would be totally separate. We'd have two completely different versions of every particle.

And that's actually connected to one of the other big implications of having the Higgs field, which is how it connects the electromagnetic force to the weak force. Let's get into that effect of having a zero Higgs field. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

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To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Right, we are imagining a universe today where the Higgs field is zero. And so we talked about what the Higgs field is, kind of why it has a non-zero or what it has some energy to it, why it can relax, and kind of what the effect of that is on particles, which is to give them the feeling that they have mass.

And so I guess if you take away the Higgs field or at least just make it zero, then And particles wouldn't feel like they have mass. That's what we just talked about, right? That particles wouldn't be flip-flopping back and forth. And so they would move through the universe like they didn't have mass. Exactly. They would move to the universe without mass and they would be split into these left-handed and right-handed versions.

It would be very different kind of universe. But it doesn't just affect the matter particles. What we're talking about right now is the fermions, the electrons, the quarks, all the things that make up matter. It would also affect the forces that exist in the universe, not just the matter. matter. Whoa. You mean the Higgs field also gives mass to forces? Is that what you're saying? Yes, exactly. Remember our story. Why we even know the Higgs field is there is because Peter Higgs saw this connection between electricity and magnetism, which was one force and the weak force. And he

realized, oh, these two things actually click together mathematically into a bigger piece of this sort of universe puzzle. Except there was a missing bit there and that was the Higgs field. But he recognize that electricity and magnetism and the weak force are very, very similar. So what the Higgs boson actually does is it unifies these two things. It connects electricity and magnetism and the weak forces together and makes a new force called electro-week. But when it does so, it fundamentally changes both of those forces. Wait, what?

Somehow the Higgs field energy makes it, like it merges the two forces together or it just like kind of provides a connection? So without the Higgs field, we would have two different other forces that were separate, but very similar to each other. And the Higgs field changes both of them and it sort of breaks them a little bit. So for example, like there's the electromagnetic force, which makes things with electrical charge repel or be attracted to each other, like electrons repelling each other or a plus and a minus being attracted to each other of electric charge.

And we also have the weak force, which is weak, but it also kind of makes things repel or track depending on the weak charge. And so somehow the Higgs boson modifies both of them. Yes. What we are seeing is the Higgs boson already having done its modification. Electricity and magnetism and the weak force are after the Higgs has already done its work. So if you start in the universe without the Higgs field, you have two other different forces. We call them hypercharge forces and isospin forces.

And the Higgs field mixes those up and makes of like a new weird combination of those things into what we today call electricity magnetism and the weak force. So without the Higgs field, you sort of untangle that. It's not like you had the electromagnetic force and the weak force and the Hicksfield mushes the two. It's like you had two other forces and then the Hicksfield mishes them together into something that we still call two things. Yes, exactly.

And we still call them two things because it mishes them together in an unequal way. So it takes the particles of these other sort of pure forces, mixes them up together to give us the photon, the Z, and the two Ws. But it's not equal about it. It leaves the photon with no mass, but it gives the Ws and the Z a lot of mass. And so it changes electricity and magnetism and the weak force in very different ways. And that's why the weak force is weak, because the Higgs field gives so much mass to its particles that it makes them very short-lived and very ineffective.

Now, this mushing of forces happens because the Higgs field exists or because it has. energy. Like if the Higgs field still existed but had zero energy, would these forces still join up? The forces would not join up. It's because the Higgs fields exist and has energy and it interacts with these particles also. It doesn't just interact with fermions. It also interacts with these sort of pure force particles. And in doing so, it actually gives up some of the Higgs bosons. The Higgs field actually can oscillate in lots of different ways. There are four different Higgs bosons that it can make. Three of them get used. used up in order to make the Ws and the Z massive.

They get sort of like eaten by the W and the Z as they get made. So then if the Higgs field had zero energy, which is kind of what we're asking today, then what would happen, these two forces or this force that we call the electric week would split into these other two forces? Yeah, exactly. First of all, there'd be four Higgs bosons in our universe instead of one, right? And electricity and magnetism would not be intertangled in the way that they are now. So we would not have the photon.

We would not have the W. We would not have the Z. Wait, what do you mean? We wouldn't have the photon. We wouldn't have light without the Higgs boson or the Higgs field. The electromagnetic field that we know of today is actually like a distortion of two other fields mixed together by the Higgs boson. So the photon is actually a combination of two other force particles. So without the Higgs field, you'd have these four particles.

We call them the X and the W123. The photon is a mixture of the X and the W3. then you would have a universe without light or you would have a universe that with something else that we would call light. Yeah, we'd have a universe with different force particles. None of them would be exactly like the photon, though they would all be massless. I don't know if we'd call one of them light or not, but it would be a very different universe with very different forces. Like I wonder if the effect would be that the electromagnetic force is the same, but the weak force would be different. You know what I mean? Like it would be a universe that we could

compare with ours and be like, oh, the electromagnetic force is the same. There's still something we call it acts like a photon, but then everything else is different. There would be a particle, the X particle, which is similar sort of to the photon, in that it's a single particle that mediates a force that would be about as powerful as electricity and magnetism, and that X particle, which would mediate the hypercharge force in that universe, would also interact with all these particles. You would be able to interact with all the quarks and the leptons and all those kinds of things. So it would be sort of similar to the photon.

And then we'd have these other three particles, the W123, from what we call the isospin force, it would be sort of similar to the weak interaction, except it would be as powerful as electromagnetism because it doesn't have the Higgs boson field sort of slowing it down. But it would only affect things with the charge for that force, right? Like it wouldn't necessarily affect electrons. It would only affect the left-handed particles, but it would affect the electron. Yeah, just the way the weak force, for example, does interact with the electron today. Interesting. And you said there's a third effect of having a zero Higgs field, too.

Yeah, that's right. The third effect, which it might be the biggest, is the one that would blow us all up. The biggest? Bigger than like taking away the mass of the electron and splitting and totally changing the electromagnetic force and making photons disappear. Oh yeah. This one would literally blow up your spot. I mean, it would make all the particles massless, right? And so the electron is massless. The quarks are massless. And as we talked about earlier, most of the mass in the universe doesn't come from the Higgs field, but the constructions that you make out of those particles do rely on the Higgs field doing its thing. For example, you want to build an atom, you need to do that out of an electron that does have mass. If you took a hydrogen atom and you suddenly made that electron massless, what would happen? Well, it would fly off at the speed of light.

A proton can't hold on to an electron that's moving at the speed of light. So the whole construction, like binding electrons into that proton to make an atom, rely on the particles having a little bit of mass. Without that mass, everything would be totally different. Well, you couldn't hold on to the electron where it was, but I wonder if it could still, you know, trap the electron somehow, even if it's moving at this speed of light. Like, for example, a black hole can trap photons,

even though they move at the speed of light. Yeah, you need a much stronger force to hold on to the electron. Or it would need to orbit at like a much higher distance for example, but the fundamental whole structure of the atom would be very, very different. Electrons in their current orbitals if you suddenly reduce the Higgs field down to zero, they would fly off at the

speed of light. So basically all of our atoms would explode. It probably is possible to make new sort of stable constructions out of these new particles, but they would be totally different from what we experience today. Yeah, so like if you flip the switch to a zero for the Higgs field

now, everything would explode. But if you start at the universe with a zero Higgs field, There would be maybe a universe with planets and stuff in it. It just would look super different than what it does today. It would definitely look super different from what it does today. And it would make all sorts of probably really interesting, complicated emergent structures that are hard for us to predict. It requires like solving the strong force equations to understand how those massless quarks might come together to make stable particles out of which you could build bigger things. I don't know how to do that.

It's very complicated. Like even today, if you said start from quarks and electrons and predict chemistry, we don't know how to do that. We don't know how to do calculations to predict what chemistry would happen, not to mention biology and psychology. And so we can't do that for other universes also. Can you predict if food trucks would still be here? I'm just saying you said the word inevitable earlier.

That was really more hopeful than based on hard calculations, unfortunately. We cannot predict whether food trucks would exist in a universe without the Higgs boson. It's a deep question of philosophy. Well, I guess maybe the last question we can ask about this strange and weird, different universe is what would it mean for gravity? Like if the Higgs field would zero, would gravity be different at all? Or could the universe still make like black holes in planets using gravity? Yeah, it's an important thing to explore because a lot of people connect the concept of mass

with gravity, right? And so they think that the Higgs boson is maybe responsible for gravity somehow. But remember that the connection between the Higgs boson and mass is only for, for elementary particles or other ways to get mass. That connection is not really that deep and tight. But gravity is very deeply connected to energy and that includes mass. So none of this would change the role of gravity at all, right?

Gravity would still operate, it would still bend space. It would still change the path of particles, even if they're all massless and moving at the speed of light. Remember that gravity can bend space that photons move through. And so gravity would still exist and you could still get black holes and all sorts of other stuff, gravity would still tug things together. Right, because gravity sort of exists

almost in a way outside of quantum fields, right? Or at least the way it's formulated by Einstein. Yeah, general relativity is not a quantum theory. We don't understand the connections between general relativity and quantum theory at all. And so you're right, if we're changing one of the knobs of quantum fields, that doesn't change our understanding of gravity.

So there would still be energy in the universe, even if fundamental particles didn't have mass, and so there would still be gravitational effects on everything. Would you still have protons, right? Like, I wonder, like, you know, if the Higgs field was zero, quarks would have no mass. Would they still bind together, though, due to the strong force? The strong force would still be there.

It would still exist. The strong force is not as affected by the Higgs boson. The way these other forces are because the gluons are massless and they don't interact with those Higgs bosons. So you would still have the strong force. Probably it would be able to bind things together into protons or proton-like structures, but they would be different because the quarks now have no mass.

And so that would definitely change them. They might be like bigger and fluffier than the protons we know today. I wonder if you could even like catch quarks to make protons because they're moving around at the speed of light. Yeah, it's hard to think about. All right. Well, it sounds like the answer to the question of whether the universe would be different if the Higgs fuel were zero is a big fat yes. A big massive, heavy yes. It would make the fundamental particles move at the speed of light, which would be totally.

trippy. Like the quarks and the electrons you're made out of would be zipping around as fast as light. It would change the forces. Like we wouldn't even have magnets, I guess. We wouldn't have electromagnetic magnets the way it is. And we'd also have more Higgs bosons. So instead of winning one Nobel Prize, maybe we could win four. Oh, yeah. That would reduce a number of murdered phys physicists in your mystery. Well, I guess it would give you like three sequels. And so maybe the body count would be higher. Oh, man. There is no suspicious death of potentially Nobel Prize winning business. I want that on the record. I don't know. It sounds kind of suspicious.

In fact, it's kind of a funny rule that Nobel put in his award, right? It's almost like he was asking for it. It's almost like he foresaw this true crime podcast. He was a visionary. All right. Well, we hope that made you think a little bit about the universe that we do live in, like how precarious it is versus a while. Great, because we don't know if the Higgs field is going to flip to him.

having zero energy. It could happen anytime. That's right. Irresponsible particle physicists might trigger the Higgs field to collapse down to its lower vacuum state, changing the very nature of the universe and food trucks. Yeah. And so we live in a precarious universe as the way it is for forces that are way outside of our control. So I guess maybe the real lesson here is to appreciate the universe that we live in because it could have been very different and we wouldn't be here. That's right. So go out and patronize that food truck. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joy.

joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving. takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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