The Higgs boson’s most captivating puzzle

If there’s one thing I’m not fond of, it’s the Higgs boson. That’s because the Higgs mechanism is said to confer mass to subatomic particles. The problem with that is that it flatly contradicts E=mc², wherein Einstein said the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. I think the wave nature of matter makes this crystal clear. Especially winhen you’ve read the likes of de Broglie, Schrödinger, Darwin, Born, and Infeld talking about the electron as a wave in a closed path. It’s simple once you see it: photon energy is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave moving linearly at c, whilst electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going round and round at c. The late Martin van der Mark explained it well in his 2015 paper on light in a mirror box. It’s like the electron is a 511keV photon in a box of its making:

Image from Light is Heavy by van der Mark and (not the Nobel) ‘t Hooft

Hence I’m not enamoured by people peddling myth and mystery about the Higgs boson. People like Ethan Siegel, who wrote The Higgs boson’s most captivating puzzle still remains. He’s pushing the usual Standard Model propaganda. Take a look at the caption on his Standard Model particle image:

Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy. Caption: The particles and antiparticles of the Standard Model have now all been directly detected, with the last holdout, the Higgs boson, falling at the LHC in 2012. Today, only the gluons and photons are massless; everything else has a non-zero rest mass. Only the quarks and gluons couple to the strong force, and experience QCD interactions.

He said “the particles and antiparticles of the Standard Model have now all been directly detected”, but it’s just not true. See for example Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and the Z by Gary Taubes. He makes it clear that the W boson was not directly detected, nor was the Z boson. Instead electrons were directly detected, and the existence of the W and Z bosons were then inferred. See this on page 28: “One event, according to the printout, had two high-energy electrons. She eyed the numbers for about a minute before deciding it was a Z-zero”. Also see The Higgs Fake by Alexander Unzicker. He makes it clear that the existence of the Higgs boson was inferred from a bump on a graph.

What is the universe made of?

But Siegel doesn’t tell you that. Instead he tells you the deepest question one can ask is “What is the Universe made of?” I rather thought Einstein answered that in 1905 when he said matter is made of energy. Google on matter is made of energy and you’ll appreciate that I’m not the only one who thinks this. Of course, you won’t find so many people talking about Einstein’s 1930 Nottingham lecture where he said  space “remains the sole medium of reality”. Hence you won’t find many people saying space and energy are the same thing. However do check out does matter differ from vacuum? by Christoph Schiller. The answer is no. But yet again Siegel ignores Einstein, and says the 1932 discovery of the neutron “kicked off the series of events that led to our modern theoretical picture of particles in the Universe: the Standard Model of elementary particles, including quarks, leptons, and all of the force-carrying bosons”. As usual, he doesn’t mention the fact that nobody has every seen a free quark, or the fact that the so-called force carrying bosons are virtual. That’s virtual as in not real. He does however peddle the usual mystery about dark matter, dark energy, inflation, and the mystery of the missing antimatter. Then he makes the grand claim that top quark mass and the Higgs boson mass might mean that the quantum vacuum is unstable:

Credit: T. Markkanen, A. Rajantie and S. Stopyra, Front. Astron. Space. Sci, 2018. Caption: Based on the masses of the top quark and the Higgs boson, we could either live in a region where the quantum vacuum is stable (true vacuum), metastable (false vacuum), or unstable (where it cannot stably remain). The evidence suggests, but does not prove, that we are in a region of false vacuum, which might be a hint that the Standard Model is possibly not all that there is to the Universe of accessible particles.

He doesn’t mention that this has no basis in fact. Or that the lifetime of the top quark is said to be 5 x 10⁻²⁵ seconds. That’s so short that the top quark was never actually seen at Fermilab. They inferred its existence from its decay products, which were a bottom qiark and a W boson. And guess what? They were never seen either. Their existence was inferred from their decay products. But Siegel doesn’t tell you this inconvenient truth, instead he makes the further claim that “the Standard Model is possibly not all that there is to the Universe of accessible particles”. He’s trying to persuade us that we need to “discover” yet more momentary particles that don’t matter a damn. This is from a guy who will tell you the electron is a point particle.

The problem of beta decay

He then waxes lyrical about the problem of beta decay, wherein a neutron decays into a proton, electron, and antineutrino. I am not impressed with this sort of stuff coming from a Standard Model champion. That’s because I’ve had too much experience of such people shutting down debate about the nature of the stable particles, or about what actually happens in electron capture, which is the inverse of beta decay. In similar vein they shut down any discussion of how the nuclear force really works, or what the weak interaction really is. Hence in Siegel’s article there is no hint of TQFT or more complex closed paths which are braced and stable in most nuclei. Instead we get the usual guff about a down quark transforming into an up quark, with the emission of a virtual W-boson, which then “forms an electron-antineutrino”.

Credit: Evan Berkowitz/ Jülich Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Caption: This diagram shows how a free neutron (or antineutron) decays at the subatomic level. A down quark (or antiquark) within a neutron (or antineutron), shown on the left in red, emits a virtual W-(or W+) boson, transforming into an up quark (or antiquark). The W-(or W+) boson forms an electron/electron antineutrino (or positron/electron neutrino) pair, while the up quark (or antiquark) recombines with the original remnant up-and-down quarks (or antiquarks) to form a proton (or antiproton). This is the process behind all beta decays in the Universe.

The mass of the W boson is circa  80GeV, nearly a hundred times the mass of the neutron, so conservation of energy means that this “explanation” of beta decay is bullshit. Siegel does at least say that this is bizarre and that force-carrying particles had to be massless, but then he moves swiftly on to a whole pack of lies-to-children about Goldstone’s Theorem. He says if you have a continuous symmetry which is spontaneously broken, integer-spin massless bosons will be generated “in numbers that correspond to the number of generators (or degrees of broken symmetry) of that symmetry in particular”. Are photons generated because of symmtery breaking? No. Which means this is just Emperor’s New Clothes. Especially since he then says you would then expect three massless Goldstone bosons, but that this “naive prediction violently disagrees with what we know today”. It’s bullshit piled on bullshit. Symmetry is portrayed as some magical mystical guiding principle. Only the symmetry is broken, the massless particles aren’t massless, and the W and Z bosons are “two of the four ultra-heavy particles that are a part of the Standard Model, along with the Higgs boson and top quarks”. If you bought all that I’ve got a bridge you might like to buy.

The power of the Higgs mechanism

Siegel then pontificates about the power of the Higgs mechanism. He starts with some hand-waving about the Higgs field being an SU(2) doublet with four degrees of freedom. Then he gives us smoke and mirrors about how how the Universe cools through an “electroweak phase transition, whereupon three of the four generators are spontaneously broken, which would normally give rise to Goldstone bosons”. Then he serves up the snake oil saying this: “because those Goldstone bosons have the same quantum numbers as three of the four electroweak gauge bosons – the ones that will become the W+, W-, and Z⁰ bosons – they mix together, giving them tremendous mass”. For the cherry on top, he tells us that “the components of the electroweak field that do not mix with Goldstone bosons form the massless photon, while the remaining degree of freedom from the Higgs symmetry breaking becomes a new scalar particle: the massive Higgs boson”. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Peter Higgs’s 1964 paper Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons. But it’s a page and a half long, and like Weinberg’s 1967 model of leptons, it’s lost-in-maths junk. For example note where Higgs said “Two real scalar fields φ₁, φ₂, and a real vector field Aμ interact”. There’s somebody who’s never read Einstein saying a field is a state of space. Or read Einstein saying the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It’s clear that  Higgs had no concept of what charge is. Ditto for Siegel, who refers to Peter Higgs’ famous particle discovery is now at the heart of strategies to unlock the secrets of the universe. What a pity Peter Higgs didn’t discover a particle. He merely proposed one. And what a pity Siegel gives us a  ludicrous depiction of a W⁺ boson eating a positively charged Higgs boson, a W⁻ boson eating a negatively charged Higgs boson, and a Z⁰ boson eating a neutral Higgs boson. It just doesn’t happen, especially since the Higgs boson is said to be chargeless.

Credit: Flip Tanedo/Quantum Diaries. Caption: When the electroweak symmetry is broken, the W+ gets its mass by eating the positively charged Higgs, the W- by eating the negatively charged Higgs, and the Z0 by eating the neutral Higgs. The other neutral Higgs becomes the Higgs boson, detected and discovered earlier this decade at the LHC. The photon, the other combination of the W3 and the B boson, remains massless.

It’s also a pity because the caption says the photon is a combination of the W3 and B bosons. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. There is absolutely no description of the photon in any of this. Even though it has measurable properties, and a clear E=hc/λ electromagnetic wave nature. Despite that, it’s described as a combination of things that have never been seen? That isn’t physics. That’s cargo-cult science. But according to Siegel all this “teaches us that we have a field that permeates all of space, the Higgs field, and that field is responsible for the non-zero rest masses of the known particles, like all species of quarks as well as the electron and its heavier cousins”. Whatever happened to the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content? But never mind that. Siegel carries on with the bullshit, saying this: “the big question that now remains is this: is the Higgs boson that we see truly the Standard Model Higgs and the Standard Model Higgs alone, or are there other particles out there – perhaps other Higgs’s, perhaps more exotic particles — that have the same quantum numbers as the Higgs boson and that mix together with it?”. Oh for Fuck’s sake, this is bullshit squared.

Breaking the symmetry of the Higgs field

But Siegel presses on regardless, giving us the “Mexican hat” flannel about symmetry breaking, which has no evidential support whatsoever. He talks about a ball rolling down from the top of a hill towards the minimum of the valley down at the bottom. Only the hill might have an additional place where the rolling ball can get trapped, this allegedly being a “false minimum” as opposed to the “true minimum” of the valley bottom. He says in both cases a symmetry can spontaneously break such that Goldstone bosons get produced, that this might apply to the Higgs field, and that this is super-important. That’s because it “goes all the way back to one of the biggest existential questions about our Universe: why it’s made overwhelmingly of matter, and not with a corresponding equal-and-opposite amount of antimatter?”. Talk about peddling myth and mystery, and ignoring the fact that baryon asymmetry is matched by lepton asymmetry. If anybody ever told Siegel that the proton was the antimatter, he would doubtless pretend not to hear it, because it would upset his myth and mystery apple cart.

Electroweak baryogenesis

Myth and mystery like GUT baryogenesis, leptogenesis, and the Affleck-Dine mechanism which is “entirely reliant on supersymmetry existing”. That’s the busted flush supersymmetry which is “a theoretical framework in physics that suggests the existence of a symmetry between particles with integer spin (bosons) and particles with half-integer spin (fermions)”. It is specious stupidity based on ignorance of what a photon is, and what an electron is. Siegel also gives us myth and mystery like electroweak baryogenesis, which is “something that we can search for with current collider technology”. He tells us that the basic Standard Model yields only a negligible matter-antimatter mismatch, “one that’s too small by a factor of about 10 billion to agree with observation”. Then he tells us that the  Standard Model isn’t all there is to reality, because if it was there would be no physical explanation for dark matter, dark energy, cosmic inflation, or the matter-antimatter asymmetry. What a pity there is no cosmic inflation, and no matter-antimatter asymmetry. And no W boson, no Z boson, and no Higgs boson either. There is however spatial energy, which in a gravitational field is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, and which acts gravitatively in the same for as any other energy. That’s what Einstein said. But to hell with Einstein, Siegel tells us a fairy story about how a composite Higgs model means the Higgs field can take on different values over different regions of space, creating severe out-of-equilibrium conditions which might mean there are enough baryon number-violating interactions to explain the entirety of the matter-antimatter asymmetry. Then he gives us a pretty picture featuring an electroweak phase transition, primordial inflation and cosmic strings. Cosmic strings! Woo!

Credit: P. Simakachorn, CERN, 2022. Caption: If there’s a strongly first-order electroweak phase transition, then in addition to the gravitational wave background produced by inflation (black line), there should be a new spectrum of gravitational waves (red peak) produced that upcoming gravitational wave observatories, such as the upcoming LISA, will be sensitive to.

How will we find out?

Siegel presses on, telling us how the new physics can be revealed “through direct evidence, like the creation of fundamentally new particles”. Presumably he’s talking about the “direct” evidence of the Z boson, which was a pair of electrons. Siegel also says “we can search for the types of particle signatures that should exist if there are extra particles that couple to and mix with the Higgs”. Presumably he’s talking about yet more bumps on a graph. He also says we can create enormous numbers of Higgs bosons and look for any signature of a departure from the predictions of the Standard Model. Unfortunately we can’t create any Higgs bosons, and never ever have. Siegel also says “we can even create a relativistic quark-gluon plasma at sufficiently high energies to try to directly create reactions that, at the end of the day, will have violated the baryon number directly”. Sigh. No wonder this is getting tedious. He’s trying to justify a Super Collider.

Something is rotten

He ends up saying “we says we don’t yet know whether the electroweak phase transition is first-order or second-order. But what he won’t tell you is that there is no actual evidence of any electroweak phase transition. Or that there are no photons flashing back and forth during gamma-gamma pair production. Or that QED says photons don’t interact with photons, when they clearly do. Nor will he tell you that the Copenhagen school’s point-particle electron led to the problem of infinities, which was covered up by the renormalisation fudge. It should have been corrected by adopting Schrödinger’s wave in a closed path. But that didn’t happen. What happened instead was described by Oliver de Consa in something is rotten in the state of QED: QED is claimed to be an amazingly precise theory, but that’s only because theoretical predictions were actually postdictions retrofitted to experimental results, time and time again. Talking of which, the wave in a closed path has come up time and time again, starting with Maxwell’s worble embracing itself.  One notable example was Williamson and van der Mark’s toroidal electron of 1996. But that never saw the light of day. Journal after journal rejected it. That’s because it would make it clear that spin was not some abstract thing, but was instead a real rotation, as evidenced by the Einstein-de Haas effect, Larmor precession, and the wave nature of matter. And because it would make it clear that the electron was a Mobius-like spin ½ spinor, wherein an electromagnetic wave in a double-loop closed path looks like a standing wave. Standing wave, standing field. That would explain charge, and leave the color charge of QCD high and dry. It would also explain why the electron g-factor is 2.002, and tell you that the proton, with a g-factor of 5.585, is not a mess of quarks of gluons, but is instead a trefoil version of the electron with a much shorter wavelength. It would also tell you that the neutrino, which moves at the speed of light, is more like the photon than the electron.

A Frankenstein’s monster patchwork quilt of a  theory

But Seigel won’t tell you any of that. Nor will he tell you that electron capture does what it says on the can, and the result is a neutron with negative charge on the outside and a positive charge on the inside. Which means the nuclear force is nothing to do with pion exchange, it’s electromagnetic, like Bernard Schaeffer said. Nor will Siegel tell you that beta decay is the opposite of electron capture, and is just the jumping popper of particle physics. Instead he tells you, with a straight face, that the weak interaction happens because 80GeV particles pop in and out of existence spontaneously, like worms from mud. And that an electroweak phase transition is “one of the greatest open questions in physics”. And that “we owe it to humanity and our own spirit of curiosity to investigate this accessible avenue as thoroughly as possible”. No pal, you owe it to humanity to stop censoring papers like Williamson and van der Mark’s. Only you won’t. You and your particle-physics thought-police will never permit that a moment’s air time, because you stand four-square in the way of scientific progress. Because you have staked your reputation on the Standard Model, a theory that’s wrong from start to finish. You will never admit that, or that it’s a Frankenstein’s monster patchwork quilt of a  theory that ignores the hard scientific evidence, the realists like Schrödinger and Einstein, and other fields of physics such as electromagnetism. That’s why it can’t explain how a magnet works. The end product is a corrupted particle physics full of quacks and charlatans peddling pseudoscience to try to persuade Joe Public to waste yet more billions on useless colliders. Colliders that have been used and abused to underpin a theory that explains nothing, and is going nowhere. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. This is not going to end well.

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