[RickyS]

Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs particles "they don't exist under normal condition" is loosely true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is nothing but a "quantum" of a "field". Fields pervade all physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta) simply represent a local state of observable things. A field can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be "extracted".

The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.

[polishdude20]

Can you think of quanta in a field as like knots in a string?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

There's limits to analogies but take a look at a soliton in a wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=909o_kbCdFg

Solitons are self re-enforcing wave packets in some medium, where the dispersive effects get canceled out. I like to think of field quanta as being similar at a very high handwavy level. Of course the trick with quanta is only certain energy levels are allowed.

[junon]

I'm not a physics person at all, just wanted to say that's a super cool video and a really neat explanation. Thanks!

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Err I meant in a pool but can't edit now doh.

[ajkjk]

Not really.

A field's normal vibration is like plucking a guitar string. A quantum is like shaking the end of a rope and seeing a ripple fly down it.

[jameshart]

A more developed version of this metaphor showed up on Youtube this very week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExhSqq1jysg

[ajkjk]

(well, the guitar string part isn't very apt. It's more like: two objects are flying connected by a stretchy rope)

[dist-epoch]

The usual metaphor is springs in a mattress:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/

[jvanderbot]

That excellent writeup reinforced something I've become convinced of: decades of "shut up and calculate" have created gobs of contradictory analogies and false intuitions that pedagogy hasn't caught up to. When I hear:

"In the jargon of field theory, physicists often say that “virtual particles” can briefly and spontaneously appear from the vacuum and then disappear again, even when no one has put enough energy into the field to create a real particle. But what they really mean is that the vacuum itself has random and indelible fluctuations, and sometimes their influence can be felt by the way they kick around real particles."

I can't help but immediately question every jargon word I see, especially "random", "particle" and "wave".

[lamontcg]

> decades of "shut up and calculate" have created gobs of contradictory analogies and false intuitions that pedagogy hasn't caught up to.

Think its the other way around really.

Decades of contradictory analogies and false intuitions later and "shut up and calculate" is still the best way to understand it.

[staunton]

Metaphors have limited applicability. The applicability of metaphors in quantum field theory that the public is ever exposed to is pretty mich limited to sounding cool and inspiring some awe in the face of all the mistery and complexity.

Im my experience, all terms in physics (like "particle", "wave", "energy") are highly context dependent and most PhDs could spend hours debating what is actually meant in a given case. Such discussions almost never lead to publishable results and are thus considered a waste of time, or leasure at best.

Usually, you just "shut up and calculate". Meanwhile, the calculations are motivated by "intuition", which involves combining known or unknown reasonable approximations with a basic theory. This process is never explained systematically and rather the hope is that it will be absorbed via osmosis by the brighter students.

It turns out, you actually don't need to have a coherent concept of "what a particle is" to perform particle physics experiments and evaluate the data. Sometimes, when pressed, operational definitions can be offered. For example, I've heard a professor say: "a particle is defined as a bump at a given energy in this plot". I'm not sure how ironic that was supposed to sound...

[nathan_compton]

In a certain sense I've become pessimistic about the possibility of ever assigning a meaningful ontology to objects at that scale. We have models which give results. Some ways of calculating scattering amplitudes make reference to virtual particles at all. I've begun to think that there is no way to understand physics _except_ to become acquainted with the mathematics of it. The analogies are pointless.

[dguest]

I usually think of the Higgs mechanism (that gives mass) like the surface tension on a pond, whereas the Higgs boson would be ripples. It's not perfect (like any analogy).