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    The Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification
    By Tommaso Dorigo | May 21st 2010 02:19 PM | 15 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    I am an experimental particle physicist working with the CMS experiment at CERN and the CDF experiment at Fermilab. In my spare time I play chess...

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    "Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields ? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and the intermediate (boson), and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum".

    Steven Weinberg

    Comments

    lumidek
    It's cool to write such a crisp answer, for the first time, including the right explanation, so that it may survive for many decades without any change and so that it is actually more logical and comprehensive than what many people say about the very same questions today. ;-)
    Luboš Motl | 05/21/10 | 14:35 PM
    A phrase whose content is literally a million bucks.

    Haelfix (not verified) | 05/21/10 | 17:16 PM
    lumidek
    Well, directly from the Scandinavian guys, he only got 1/3 of the money. And he had to add some ideas....

    More importantly, on the positive side, Weinberg himself has surely gotten more money than just the no-feedback Nobel prize as a result of the quote.

    However, the importance for the mankind is priceless and Weinberg has only received a tiny fraction of it. I surely think that the value of the insight above is in tens of billions of dollars. It's hard to collect this money explicitly and to show that it's the price. 

    But you can view it as the price of the collider, including the pro-science advertisement you would have to pay for the taxpayers to pay the collider :-), that you would need to build for Weinberg's insight to become obvious even to "more average" physicists so that they could give the insight to you for a negligible price.

    Luboš Motl | 05/21/10 | 23:59 PM
    The quote might be worth a million dollars, but only AFTER the conjecture of symmetry breaking by the vacuum is confirmed by experiment. So far, it has not yet been confirmed, as the Higgs has not been found.

    Anonymous (not verified) | 05/23/10 | 07:03 AM
    lumidek
    Well, markets still incorporate some expectations into the price, and I have personally included over 99.9% of the symmetry breaking into my price. After all, Weinberg has already received a Nobel prize largely for this thing, too. ;-)
    Luboš Motl | 05/23/10 | 11:31 AM
    Yep, and it won't be found. The quote itself is wrong, the difference between weak and EM interactions has nothing to do with the vacuum itself.

    presci (not verified) | 05/26/10 | 07:01 AM
    lumidek
    It's too bad that the authors of statements similar to the one above - by presci - are such insolvent and anonymous losers who can't be trusted or reliably found because it would be a lot of fun to make big bets that the Higgs will be found in a few years.
    Luboš Motl | 05/26/10 | 07:19 AM
    dorigo
    Indeed, such comments are totally useless. I wonder what kind of satisfaction it gives to the author. Presci, if you could just be more precise on what you mean, maybe adding some links to reading material which supports your claim, we would change our opinion...

    Cheers,
    T.
    Tommaso Dorigo | 05/26/10 | 09:03 AM
    lumidek
    Wow, Tommaso, you have just shocked me. I expected you to write a long essay explaining that presci is a genius who has trumped all Weinbergs in the history of science combined and who would even trump Berlusconi in the bedroom.
    ...

    But in fact, you shouldn't underestimate presci. Your blog may soon be transformed to a platform to efficiently link to hundreds of crackpot websites showing that the Higgs boson is a conspiracy by the deniers of presci.
    Luboš Motl | 05/26/10 | 09:18 AM
    The difference between weak and EM interactions is due to the fact that they arise from different features of the structure of particle fields. There is of course much more to this story but I leave it to LHC to do the convincing.

    presci (not verified) | 05/27/10 | 06:46 AM
    dorigo
    And electroweak theory is not just electroweak symmetry breaking. The Nobel prize is deserved anyway.

    Cheers,
    T.
    Tommaso Dorigo | 05/23/10 | 12:10 PM
    lumidek
    Dear Tommaso, I disagree with this description of the contributions. You can check that Weinberg has received the Nobel prize for his work on the electroweak theory, and no other theory,
    http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/


    Moreover, the insights about symmetry breaking outside the electroweak context are not due to Weinberg but they came from other people such as Nambu, Goldstone, Higgs, etc.

    So if someone says that the electroweak symmetry breaking is not there, or is not a valid established science, then he also says that Weinberg shouldn't have really received this Nobel prize for the stated reason because it's his main contribution to the electroweak theory.

    Needless to say, I find such an attitude crazy and Weinberg is among the top 5 most deserved Nobel prize winners ever - but if someone believes that there won't be any Higgs sector or anything like that, he does believe that Weinberg's Nobel prize is a mistake, too.
    Luboš Motl | 05/23/10 | 12:24 PM
    reference or link?

    Anonymous (not verified) | 05/23/10 | 15:07 PM
    dorigo
    Anon, if you are asking for a reference for the quote, it is contained (among other places) in a book on modern physics, "From alpha to Z0" by James Rohlf.
    Cheers,
    T.
    Tommaso Dorigo | 05/23/10 | 15:13 PM
    Weinberg's paper containing this quote is online at http://cos.cumt.edu.cn/jpkc/dxwl/zl/zl1/Physical%20Review%20Classics/par...

    Bill K (not verified) | 05/23/10 | 17:40 PM

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