
What has the Higgs boson done for us? - prateekj
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929351.000-what-has-the-higgs-boson-done-for-us.html#.Uua4AmTTlok
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gus_massa
The physics in the press article is wrong:

> _Mass, in a nutshell, is not what you think it is. Not by a long
> chalk.According to Lederman and Hill, a subatomic particle such as a muon,
> which feels the weak nuclear force, flickers back and forth between a right
> and a left corkscrewing form (the flicker is known as Zitterbewegung)._

This is not Zitterbewegung, it’s a change of Chirality.

Zitterbewegung: For technical reasons, too long to explain, the velocity of
the subatomic particles can be constant, the best next thing is to have
particles that travel with a constat average velocity, but have an aditional
oscilation, like x(t) = x_0 + v_0 * t + a * cos(w * t), (more details, about a
and w in wikipedia.) The important thing is that it is an oscillation in the
real xyz space, very small, but it’d be possible to see it with a magical
microscopy, because the particle is moving (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitterbewegung)
)

Chirality / (very similar to Helicity): There are two tipe of muons the left-
handed muons and the right-handed muons. They look similar and have the same
mass (whatever that means), but they are very different, for example only the
left-handed muons feel the weak force. Using the magic microscopy, we would
not see that the particle is oscilatiog, we would see that the particle is
spinning (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_\(physics\))
)

Really, the left-handed muons are constantly transforming into right-handed
muons, and the right-handed muons are constantly transforming into left-handed
muons. This transformation is related to the vacuum expectation value of the
Higgs field, that is very related to the Higgs boson, but to explaining the
differences I need to write a long and technical explanation.

> _If, however, the muon could be boosted to the speed of light, its time
> would slow to a standstill, as predicted by Einstein 's special theory of
> relativity. A particle that experiences no passage of time is a photon, so
> the muon would appear like a photon. Since a photon has no rest mass,
> running with the photon analogy, neither would the superfast muon. Its mass
> would have been "switched off". But all that has happened to it is that the
> flickering between left and right forms has stopped. The inference is that
> this oscillation is what gives a muon its mass._

Simply wrong! Just for an example, it this idea where correct, when the muon
is traveling at half the light speed, it would have less mass than a static
moun.

