Why the weak nuclear force is short range
Doesn't this "explanation" just shift the question to what is stiffness? Like it refactored the question but didn't actually explain it.
Previously, we had statement "the weak force is short range". In order to explain it, we had to invent a new concept "stiffness" that is treated as a primitive and not explained in terms of other easy primitives, and then we get to "accurately" say that the weak force is short due to stiffness.
I grant the OP that stiffness might be hard to explain, but then why not just say "the weak force is short range -- and just take that as an axiom for now".
Besides the fact that stiffness shows up as a term in the equations, stiffness is a concept that can be demonstrated via analogy with a rubber sheet, and so lends itself to a somewhat more intuitive understanding.
Also, the math section demonstrated how stiffness produces both the short-range effect and the massive particles, so instead of just handwaving "massive particles is somehow related to the short range" the stiffness provides a clear answer as to why that's the case.
I think it's a big improvement. Stiffness is something you can picture directly, so the data -> conclusions inference "stiffness" -> "mass and short range" follows directly from the facts you know and your model of what they mean. Whereas "particles have mass" -> "short range" requires someone also telling you how the inference step (the ->) works, and you just memorize this as a fact: "somebody told me that mass implies short range". You can't do anything with that (without unpacking it into the math), and it's much harder to pattern-match to other situations, especially non-physical ones.
It seems to me like the right criteria for a good model is:
* there are as few non-intuitable inferences as possible, so most conclusions can be derived from a small amount of knowledge
* and of course, inferences you make with your intuition should not be wrong
(I suppose any time you approximate a model with a simpler one---such as the underlying math with a series of atomic notions, as in this case---you have done some simplification and now you might make wrong inferences. But a lot of the wrongness can be "controlled" with just a few more atoms. For instance "you can divide two numbers, unless the denominator is zero" is such a control: division is intuitive, but there's one special case, so you memorize the general rule plus the case, and that's still a good foundation for doing inference with)
If you read far enough into the math-y explanations, stiffness is a quantity in the equations. That makes it more than a hand waving explanation in my book.
Because you may get something else out of stiffness besides this explanation? Usually that's how a level deeper explanation works.
> Google’s AI, for instance, and also here — that the virtual particles with mass actually “decay“
Do virtual particles decay?
What makes me skeptical here is that the author claims that fields have a property that is necessary to explain this, and yet physicists have not given that property a name, so he has to invent one (“stiffness”). If the quantity appears in equations, I find it hard to believe that it was never given a name. Can anyone in the field of physics elucidate?
The author isn't inventing anything. He's just dumbing it down in an extreme way so that non-physicists could have the faintest hope of understanding it. Wich seems odd, because if you actually want to understand any of this you should prepare to spend two or three years in university level math classes first. The truth is that in reality all this is actually a lot more complex. In the Higgs field (or any simple scalar field for that matter) for example, there is a free parameter that we could immediately identify as "mass" in the way described in the article. But weirdly enough, this is not the mass of the Higgs boson (because of some complicated shenanigans). Even more counterintuitive, fermionic (aka matter) fields and massive bosonic fields (i.e. the W and Z bosons mentioned in the article) in the Standard Model don't have any mass term by themselves at all. They only get something that looks (and behaves) like a mass term from their coupling to the Higgs field. So it's the "stiffness" of the Higgs field (highly oversimplified) that gives rise to the "stiffness" of the other fields through complex interactions governed by symmetries. And to put it to the extreme, the physical mass you can measaure in a laboratory is something that depends on the energy scale at which you perform your experiments. So even if you did years of math and took an intro to QFT class and finally think you begin to understand all this, Renormalization Group Theory comes in kicks you back down. If you go really deep, you'll run into issues like Landau Poles and Quantum Triviality and the very nature of what perturbation theory can tell us about reality after all. In the end you will be two thirds through grad school by the time you can comfortably discuss any of this. The origin of mass is a really convoluted construct and these low-level discussions of it will always paint a tainted picture. If you want the truth, you can only trust the math.
I think perhaps the 'maths' at the bottom is a bit of a retelling of the Yukawa potential which you can get in a "relatively understandable" way from the Klein-Gordon equation. However, the KG equation is very very wrong!
Perhaps an approach trying to actually explain the Feynman propagators would be more helpful? Either way, I agree that if someone wanted to understand this all properly it requires a university education + years of postgrad exposure to the delights of QED / electroweak theory. If anyone here wants a relatively understandable deep dive, my favourite books are Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur [aka graduate student] by Stephen Blundell [who taught me] and Tom Lancester [his former graduate student], and also Quarks and Leptons by Halzel and Martin. It is not a short road.
The Yukawa potential is also just a more "classical" limit of an inherently quantum mechanical process. Sure you can explain things with it and even do some practical calculations, but if you plan on going to the bottom of it it'll always fail. If you want to explain Feynman propagators correctly you basically have to explain so many other things first, you might as well write a whole book. And even then you're trapped in the confines of perturbation theory, which is only a tiny window into a much bigger world. I really don't think it is possible to convey these things in a way that is both accurate (in the sense that it won't lead to misunderstandings) and simple enough so that people without some hefty prerequisites can truly understand it. I wish it were different. Because this is causing a growing rift between scientists and the normal population.
IIRC, Feynman said something like "I can't explain magnetism to a layperson in terms they can understand."
> ...causing a growing rift between scientists and the normal population.
True.
> the KG equation is very very wrong!
How so? It's the standard equation for a scalar (spin zero) field.
I haven't read the other two, but I'll second 'Quarks and Leptons'. I do believe it's Halzen though, rather than Halzel...
Fortuitously the author of the posted article also has a series on the Higgs mechanism (with the math, but still including some simplifications): https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
Those posts would really benefit from some math typesetting in latex.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Can an LLM reliably re-format it for us?
EDIT: yes I tried pasting it in to Gemini, 4o, and Claude. Only Claude was able to zero-shot create the latex and an html wrapper that renders it, and open the html preview on iOS. It worked great.
At some point our understanding of fundamental reality will be limited not by how much the physicists have uncovered but by how many years of university it would take to explain it. In the end each of us only has one lifetime.
He addresses this in the comments. The term that corresponds to "stiffness" normally just gets called "mass", since that is how it shows up in experiments.
Roughly put:
- A particle is a "minimum stretching" of a field.
- The "stiffness" corresponds to the energy-per-stretch-amount of the field (analogous to the stiffness of a spring).
- So the particle's mass = (minimum stretch "distance") * stiffness ~ stiffness
The author's point is that you don't need to invoke virtual particles or any quantum weirdness to make this work. All you need is the notion of stiffness, and the mass of the associated particle and the limited range of the force both drop out of the math for the same reasons.
> The term that corresponds to "stiffness" normally just gets called "mass", since that is how it shows up in experiments.
Then why not just call it "mass"? That's what it is. How is the notion of "stiffness" any better than the notion of "mass"? The author never explains this that I can see.
Undergrad-only level physics person here:
I think stiffness is an ok term if your aim is to maintain a field centric mode of thinking. Mass as a term is particle-centric.
It seems these minimum-stretching could also be thought of as a “wrinkle”. It’s a permanent deformation of the field itself that we give the name to, and thus “instantiate” the particle.
Eye opening.
> I think stiffness is an ok term if your aim is to maintain a field centric mode of thinking.
"Stiffness" to me isn't a field term or a particle term; it's a condensed matter term. In other words, it's a name for a property of substances that is not fundamental; it's emergent from other underlying physics, which for convenience we don't always want to delve into in detail, so we package it all up into an emergent number and call it "stiffness".
On this view, "stiffness" is a worse term than "mass", which does have a fundamental meaning (see below).
> Mass as a term is particle-centric.
Not to a quantum field theorist. :-) "Mass" is a field term in that context; you will see explicit references to "massless fields" and "massive fields" all over the literature.
In the unit analysis it appears as if it's just kinematic viscosity.
It does have a name, it's called "coupling." A spring (to physicists all linkages are springs :-) ) couples a pair of train cars, and a coupling constant attaches massive fields to the higgs field.
Even capacitors and thermal models in solids are springs.
> If the quantity appears in equations, I find it hard to believe that it was never given a name.
It does have a name: mass!
What I'm skeptical of is that this "stiffness" is somehow logically or conceptually prior to mass. Looking at the math, it just is mass. The term in the equation that this author calls the "stiffness" term is usually just called the "mass" term.
It's nonsense. The fact that the particle is massive is a direct cause of the fact that the interactions are short ranged.
The nuance is this: Naturally, in a field theory the word "particle" is ill-defined, thus the only true statement one can make is that: the propagator/green function of the field contains poles at +-m, which sort of hints at what he means by stiffness.
As a result of this pole, any perturbations of the field have an exponential decaying effect. But the pole is the mass, by definition.
The real interesting question is why Z and W bosons are massive, which have to do with the higgs mechanism. I.e., prior to symmetry breaking the fields are massless, but by interacting with the Higgs, the vacuum expectation value of the two point function of the field changes, thus granting it a mass.
In sum, whoever wrote this is a bit confused and just doesn't have a lot of exposure to QFT
Actually upon further reading I realize that the author actually goes deeper into what I thought, so it's not nonsense, it's actually a simplified version of what I tried to write.
But I don't particularly like the whole "mass vs not mass" discussion as it's pointless
that & pointless is an amazing pun intentional or otherwise; well-done, just absolutely
One thing that confused me at the very beginning is, the author says the weak force is weak because it is short range. But the strong force is also short range.
The strong force is short range for a different reason. It's called [confinement][1]. The strong force gets stronger as you pull color charges apart. At some point the energy is so high that it's very likely that corresponding matching-color particles will exist, and so now there two pairs of close charges, instead of one pair of far charges.
The weak force is weak not because it has "short range" but because its range "dies off at distances ten million times smaller than an atom".
It seems to me that there is a 1:1 correlation between mass of virtual particle and field stiffness. Given that fact, why isn't it equally correct to say "The field stiffness is caused by the mass of the virtual particle" and "The virtual particle necessarily has mas because the field is stiff"
The author states that "it is short range because the particles that “mediate” the force, the W and Z bosons, have mass;" is misleading as to causality, but I missed the part where they showed how/why it was misleading.
Because in a classical theory, where there are no particles, there is still the same short range potential.
This arises from a parameter in the elementary field equation. If that parameter is non-zero than it is both true that the field is stiff and it must be mediated by a particle with non-zero rest mass. This says nothing about causality.
If we wanted to model the universe as a set of equations or a cellular automaton, how complex would that program be?
Could a competent software engineer, even without knowing the fundamental origins of things like particle masses or the fine-structure constant, capture all known fundamental interactions in code?
I guess I'm trying to figure out the complexity of the task of universe creation, assuming the necessary computational power exists. For example, could it be a computer science high school project for the folks in the parent universe (simulation hypothesis). I know that's a tough question :)
I'm surprised that more sibling comments aren't covering the lack of a unified theory here. Currently, our best understanding of gravity (general relativity) and our best understanding of everything else (electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, strong/weak force via the standard model) aren't consistent. They have assumptions and conclusions that contradict each other. It is very difficult to investigate these contradictions closely because the interesting parts of GR show up only in very massive objects (stars, black holes) and the interesting parts of everything else show up in the tiniest things (subatomic particles, photons).
So we don't have a set of equations that we could expect to model the whole universe in any meaningful way.
At the level of writing a program to simulate the universe as we see it, ideas like classical gravity (see Penrose) would probably work.
Our present best guess is that cellular automatons would be an explosively difficult way to simulate the universe because BQP (the class of problems that can be related to simulating a quantum system for polynomial time) is probably not contained in P (the class of problems Turing machines can solve in polynomial time).
The formulas are really not very complex. The Standard Model is a single Lagrangian with a couple of dozen constants.
You can expand that Lagrangian out to look more complex, but that's just a matter of notation rather than a real illustration of its complexity. There's no need to treat all of the quarks as different terms when you can compress them into a single matrix.
General relativity adds one more equation, in a matrix notation.
And that's almost everything. That's the whole model of the universe. It just so happens that there are a few domains where the two parts cause conflicts, but they occur only under insanely extreme circumstances (points within black holes, the universe at less than 10^-43 seconds, etc.)
These all rely on real numbers, so there's no computational complexity to talk about. Anything you represent in a computer is an approximation.
It's conceivable that there is some version out there that doesn't rely on real numbers, and could be computed with integers in a Turing machine. It need not have high computational complexity; there's no need for it to be anything other than linear. But it would be linear in an insane number of terms, and computationally intractable.
>These all rely on real numbers, so there's no computational complexity to talk about.
There's a pretty decent argument real numbers are not enough:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04160-4/ https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/7
>The Standard Model is a single Lagrangian with a couple of dozen constants.
I hear it's a bit more complex than that!
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-what-the-standard-model...
It's a single lagrangian with a couple of dozen constants, in their pics there as well. It's just expanded out to different degrees.
Through smart definitions I can contract any longer term as much as I want.
Nah it really is simpler than that, that picture has exploded the summations to make it look complicated. Although it is strangely hard to find the compressed version written down anywhere...
the thing about Lagrangians is that they compose systems by adding terms together: L_AB = L_A + L_B if A and B don't interact. Each field acts like an independent system, plus some interaction terms if the fields interact. So most of the time, e.g. on Wikipedia[0], people write down the terms in little groups. But still, note on the Wikipedia page that there are not that many terms in the Lagrangian section, due to the internal summations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_formulation_of_th...
I can't help but wonder if, under extreme conditions, the universe has some sort of naturally occurring floating-point error conditions, where precision is naturally eroded and weird things can occur.
I doubt it. Even the simplest physical system requires a truly insane number of basic operations. Practically everything is integrals-over-infinity. If there were implemented in a floating-point system, you'd need umpteen gazillion bits to avoid flagrant errors from happening all the time.
It's not impossible that the universe is somehow implemented in an "umpteen gazillion bits, but not more" system, but it strikes me as a lot more likely that it really is just a real-number calculation.
Right, I don't mean literally floating-point errors, but something similar.
That could very well be what the quantum uncertainty principal is, floating point non deterministic errors. It also could just be drawing comparisons among different problem domains.
Rephrasing what some of the other answers have said, with a decent knowledge of math you could write the program, but you wouldn’t be able to run it in a reasonable time for anything but the most trivial scenarios.
You (sorta) can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
The trick is (as the sibling comments explain) that it involves an exponential number of calculations, so it's extremely slow unless you are interested only in very small systems.
Going more technical, the problem with systems with the strong force is that they are too difficult to calculate, so the only method to get results is to add a fake lattice and try solving the system there. It works better than expected and it includes all the forces we know, well except gravity , and it includes the fake grid. So it's only an approximation.
> Could a competent software engineer, even without knowing the fundamental origins of things like particle masses or the fine-structure constant, capture all known fundamental interactions in code?
Nobody know where that numbers come from, so they are just like 20 or 30 numbers in the header of the file. There is some research to try to reduce the number, but I nobody knows if it's possible.
Stephen Wolfram has been taking a stab at it. Researching fundamental physics via computational exploration is how I'd put it. https://www.wolframphysics.org/
He is basically a crackpot. Any attempt at fundamental physics that doesn't take quantum mechanics into account is.... uhm.... how to put this.... 'questionable'.
I'm not even able to hold a candle to Wolfram intellectually- the guy is a universe away from me in that regard. But: Given a cursory look at his wiki page and Cosma Shalizi's review of his 2002 book on cellular automata [1], I feel fairly comfortable saying that it seems like he fell in the logician's trap of assuming that everything is computable [2]:
>There’s a whole way of thinking about the world using the idea of computation. And it’s very powerful, and fundamental. Maybe even more fundamental than physics can ever be.
>Yes, there is undecidability in mathematics, as we’ve known since Gödel’s theorem. But the mathematics that mathematicians usually work on is basically set up not to run into it. But just being “plucked from the computational universe”, my cellular automata don’t get to avoid it.
I definitely wouldn't call him a crackpot, but he does seem to be spinning in a philosophical rut.
I like his way of thinking (and I would, because I write code for a living), but I can't shake the feeling that his physics hypotheses are flawed and are destined to bear no fruit.
But I guess we'll see, won't we?
[1] http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/how-we-got-here-...
That really seems to be mischaracterizing his work. The idea is that the quantum effects we see will eventually emerge.
Most people in the field don't think his research will be fruitful, but that doesn't make him a crack pot
most people in the field believe his research isn't even capable of being wrong
Someone seems to say something demeaning like that about him whenever he comes up, and I don't really know why. Which is fine, maybe it's a subjective thing. For what it's worth, the few times I read something of his, I loved it.
It's a complex issue. He is obviously extremely intelligent and at least a decent business man. If you've never used Wolfram Mathematica before, I implore you to pick up a raspberry pi and play with the educational version. It's nothing short of magical in many ways. I still prefer Python in a lot of ways (least of all with Python being free/open), but Mathematica notebooks are nuts. You can do anything from calculus to charts, geographic visualizations, neural networks, NLP, audio processing, optimization, text processing, time series analysis, matrices, and a bazillion other things with a single command or by chaining them together. It has its warts, but is very polished.
He also did some important early work on cellular automata if iirc.
Then he wrote "A New Kind of Science", which reads like an ego trip and was not received well by the community (it is a massive tome that could have been summarized with a much smaller book). He also tried to claim discoveries from one of his workers due to some NDA shenanigans (or something along these lines iirc). The latter doesn't make him a crank, just a massive egotist, which is a trait nearly all cranks have. Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on him and how he only publishes in his own made up journals and generally doesn't use the process used by all other scientists. I think a lot believe where there is smoke, there is fire. To his credit, she also mentioned that some physicists gave him some critical feedback and he did then go and spend a bunch of time addressing the flaws they found.
His writing is clearly narcissistic, but I don't mean that in the "unlikeable personality" way but in the "this person cannot perceive the universe except with him at the center of it way".
In particular you can tell, just from how his stuff is written, that he is at some level constitutionally incapable of incorporating other people's knowledge or ideas into his own thoughts. There are basically no references to other models, no time spent showing how ideas ladder up to known facts; no implication that that even ought to be done, that his statements ought to be demonstrated before the reader will take them seriously; almost all references are to his own work and his unproven and mostly unconcrete models; yet he refers to his own thing as though they are canonical fact; no attention is paid to making sure the ideas make sense to the reader or allow one to do useful conclusions ... it all reads like an unhinged manic episode (not in the clinical sense, maybe (I don't really know how that's defined), but in the colloquial sense).
Now, it seems to me that a manic episode can eventually find really good ideas. Maybe at some level that's what that mode of thought is for: finding things that are really, really out there in the landscape of thoughts. But in the meantime it is utterly offputting and reads as "insane" rather than "brilliant". I know enough math and physics to at least evaluate a good chunk of it and I can't distinguish it from random BS crackpots online except that the pictures are better.
Well, one can love playing chess and that is all fine and good and so on but if someone says that chess is the fundamental theory of the universe, how much sense does that make? There might even even be truth in that statement, who could possibly know? All we can be quite certain about is that to actually demonstrate the hypothetical truth of the statement 'chess is the fundamental theory of the universe' some number, presumably larger than 5, of nobel price level of physics discoveries need to take place.
You are making an unscientific criticism.
Wolfram's claim is that Cellukar Automata can provide as good or better mathematical model of the universe than current current theories, by commonly appreciated metrics such as "pasimony of theory" (Occam's Razor). He's not making claims about metaphysical truth.
I sympathize with your opinion of him being a crackpot but he is also a genius and the idea is that the graphs in his theory are more fundamental than quantum mechanics and it would emerge from them.
Less ambitiously, how small and clear could you make a program for QED calculations? Where you're going for code that can be clear to someone educated with only undergrad physics, with effort, to help explain what the theory even is -- not for usefulness to career physicists.
Maybe still too ambitious, because I haven't heard of such a program.
Wolfram actually got his start writing these.
The universe is already modeled that way. Differential equations are a kind of continuous time and space version of cellular automata, where the next state at a point is determined by the infinitesimally neighboring states.
My first thought was 'ah, yes.' My second thought was 'but what about nonlocality?'
http://oyhus.no/QuantumMechanicsForProgrammers.html gives a flavor of one possible shape of things. It's pretty intractable to actually compute anything this way.
I do wonder if you'd want to implement a sort of 3D game engine that simulates the entire universe, if somehow the weird stuff quantum physics and general relativity do (like the planck limit, the lightspeed limit, discretization, the 2D holographic bound on amount of stuff in 3D volumes, the not having an actual value til measured, the not being able to know momentum and speed at the same time, the edge of observable universe, ...) will turn out to be essential optimizations of this engine that make this possible.
Many of the quantum and general relativity behaviors seem to be some kind of limits (compared to a newtonian universe where you can go arbitrarily small/big/fast/far). Except quantum computing, that one's unlocking even more computation instead so is the opposite of a limit and making it harder rather than easier to simulate...
Stephen Wolfram is trying to model physics as a hypergraph
How complex? I'm no physicist nor an expert at this, but AFAIK we aren't really capable of simulating even a single electron at the quantum scale right now? Correct me if I'm wrong.
We can simulate much more than that, even at the quantum scale. What we cannot do is calculate things analytically, so we only have approximations, but for simulation that’s more than enough.
Well, Newton thought he could do it with just 3 lines, and we've all been playing code golf ever since.
To be fair, his universe was much simpler than ours. He didn't need a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold in his theory.
I've always thought that gravity exists because without it, matter doesn't get close enough for interesting things to happen.
Horribly complex and/or impossible.
(1) quantum mechanics means that there is not just one state/evolution of the universe. Every possible state/evolution has to be taken into account. Your model is not three-dimensional. It is (NF * NP)-dimensional. NF is the number of fields. NP is the the number of points in space time. So, you want 10 space-time points in a length direction. The universe is four-dimensional so you actually have 10000 space-time points. Now your state space is (10000 * NF)-dimensional. Good luck with that. In fact people try to do such things. I.e., lattice quantum field theory but it is tough.
(2) I am not really sure what the state of the art is but there are problems even with something simple like putting a spin 1/2 particle on a lattice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion_doubling
(3) Renormalization. If you fancy getting more accuracy by making your lattice spacing smaller, various constants tend to infinity. The physically interesting stuff is the finite part of that. Calculations get progressively less accurate.
To go down this rabbit hole, the deeper question is about the vector in Hilbert space that represents the state of the universe. Is it infinite dimensional?
Yes, but that is not saying very much. Just one single harmonic oscillator already has a state space that is an infinitely dimensional Hilbert space. It is L^2. Now make a tensor product of NF * NP of these already infinitely dimensional Hilbert spaces defined above to get quite a bit more infinite.
The scales get you:
You can’t simulate a molecule at accurate quark/gluon resolution.
The equations aren’t all that complex, but in practice you have to approximate to model the different levels, eg https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMoTR49uj6ld32zLVWmcG...
> Could a competent software engineer, even without knowing the fundamental origins of things like particle masses or the fine-structure constant, capture all known fundamental interactions in code?
I don't think so.
In classical physics, "all" you have to do is tot up the forces on every particle and you get a differential equation that is pretty easy to numerically work with. Scale is a challenge all of its own, and of course you'd ideally need to learn about all the numerical issues you can run into. But the math behind Runge-Kutta methods isn't that advanced (really, you just need some calculus to even explain what you're doing in the first place), so that's pretty approachable to a smart high schooler.
But when you get to quantum mechanics, it's different. The forces aren't described in a way that's amenable to tot-up-all-the-forces-on-every-particle, which is why you get stuff like https://xkcd.com/1489/ (where the explainer is unable to really explain anything about the strong or weak force). As an arguably competent software engineer, my own attempts to do something like this have always resulted in my just bouncing off the math entirely. And my understanding of the math--as limited as it is--is that some things like gravity just don't work at all with the methods we have at hand to us, despite us working at it for 50 years.
By way of comparison, my understanding is that our best computational models of fundamental forces struggle to model something as complicated as an atom.
The effect of stiffness can also be represented by stretchability of the string. Picking up a string with a free end will result in the same shape described by adding stiffness. A fanciful analogy might be a chain of springs with constant k2 where each spring junction is anchored to the ground with a spring with constant k1. If k2>>k1 the entire spring chain lifts in a gentle arc when a spring is lifted. If k1>>k2, only the springs near the pulling point really stretch and displace. It’s these kinds of simple analogies that engage our intuition. I still however cannot envision a mechanical analogy to demonstrate wavicles.
This is a lot of words to say that the field oscillations (i.e., particles) require very high energy. This shows up as the mass-(energy) of the particle, or stiffness of the field; take your pick.
Whether you call that stiffness or mass is a little beside the point IMO -- it shows up in the Yukawa force as an exponential dependence on that parameter which means the force quickly decays to zero unless the parameter is 0.
The top of fig 3 doesn't accurately represent a string pulled down in the middle. A string pulled down in the middle would have no curve to it in the legs unless some force is acting on it, it would look like a V.
To me it seems like it's depicting a situation where the string hasn't been pulled fully, so some of its slack hasn't straightened out into the otherwise resulting triangle yet.
> Only stiff fields can have standing waves in empty space, which in turn are made from “particles” that are stationary and vibrating. And so, the very existence of a “particle” with non-zero mass is a consequence of the field’s stiffness.
It's really difficult to reconcile "standing waves in empty space" with "stiff fields". If the space is truly empty, then the field seems to be an illusion?
If we think about fields as the very old concept of aether, then it actually makes more intuitive sense. Stiffness then becomes simply the viscosity of the aether.
But I don't think this is where this article is trying to get us!!
fields are a non-mechanical aether, more precisely they are lorentz invarient (ie., their motion is the same for all observers)
And if you can hop from each standing wave node to the next, you can teleport, or move ridiculously fast by moving discretely instead of continuously. What if you could tune the wavelength of these standing waves with particles stationary and vibrating?
I like the speaker on water / styrofoam particle demonstration of standing waves.
Or change the frequency of the wave you are standing on (or those around you, I’m not sure which) and move forward like an inchworm
I believe this is not dissimilar to the mechanics suggested by the ZPE/antigravity people like Ashton Forbes
TLDR; It is short range primarily because the underlying fields (those of the W and Z bosons) are “stiff,” causing any disturbance to die off exponentially at distances much smaller than an atom’s diameter. In quantum language, that same stiffness manifests as the nonzero masses of the W and Z bosons, so their corresponding force does not effectively propagate over long distances—hence it appears “weak” and short-range.
So it’s like a stiff spring /strut vs a loose one? Doesn’t a loose suspension dampen and stiff propagate quicker though?
As an aside, is there conclusive evidence to say that no aether exists, or are we just saying it doesn't exist because a handful of tests were conducted to match what we thought this aether would behave like and the tests came back negative?
Lorentz formulated his ideas in terms of a motionless aether. But his aether theory yielded predictions identical to special relativity, so later physicists ditched his interpretation in favor of Einstein's theory that didn't need an undetectable global reference frame.
Overall, we can't really have 'conclusive evidence' against any mechanism, as long as our observations might possibly be simulated on top of that mechanism. So as far as evidence goes, 'what really exists' might be higher-dimensional strings, or cellular automata, or turtles all the way down, or whatever.
Instead, physics has some number of models (either complementary or competing) that people find compelling, and mechanisms on top of those models to explain our observations. If you did come up with a modern aether theory, you'd have to come up with a mechanism on top of it to explain all the relativistic effects we've observed.
We say the "aether" as it was originally conceptualized in the 19th century doesn't exist for the same reason we say that Russell's teapot or Carl Sagan's invisible dragon in the garage doesn't exist: we have a model of the world that makes all the same predictions without it, so it gets scraped right off by Occam's Razor.
For a strict enough definition of "conclusive," there is never conclusive evidence that something doesn't exist.
On top of that, if we find something that behaves nothing like what people meant when they said aether, then is it really aether?
Magnetic field is that aether.
Urgh, I'm half way through this and I hate it.
The problem is it's upfront that "X thing you learned is wrong" but is then freely introducing a lot of new ideas without grounding why they should be accepted - i.e. from sitting here knowing a little physics, what's the intuition which gets us to field "stiffness"? Stiff fields limit range, okay, but...why do we think those exist?
The article just ends the explanation section and jumps to the maths, but fails to give any indication at all as to why field stiffness is a sensible idea to accept? Where does it come from? Why are non-stiff fields just travelling around a "c", except that we observe "c" to be the speed of light that they travel around?
When we teach people about quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle even at a pop-sci level, we do do it by pointing to the actual experiments which build the base of evidence, and the logical conflicts which necessitate deeper theory (i.e. you can take that idea, and build a predictive model which works and here's where they did that experiment).
This just...gives no sense at all as to what this stiffness parameter actually is, why it turned up, or why there's what feels like a very coincidental overlap with the Uncertainty principle (i.e. is that intuition wrong because actually the math doesn't work out, is this just a different way of looking at it and there's no absolute source of truth or origin, what's happening?)
In all honesty, this gives a delightful if frightening look into how physicists are thinking amongst themselves. As a (former) particle physicist myself, I can’t remember the number of times an incredulous engineer has confronted me with “the truth” about physics. But you see, for practicing physicists, the models and theories are fluid and actually up for discussion and interpretation, that’s our job after all. The problem is that the official output is declared to be immutable laws of nature, set in formulae and dogmatic conventions. That said, I agree that he is trading one possible fallacy for another here, but the beauty of the thing is that the “stiffness” explanation is invoking less assumptions than the quantum one - which physicists agree is a “good thing” (Occam’s razor).
There definitely seems to be a modern trend of over complication in physics along with the voodoo-like worship of math. Humbly enough, people have only come to understand the equations for an apple falling out of a tree within the last 500 years, and that necessitated the invention of Calculus.
What's more distressing than the insular knowledge cults of modern physics is the bizarre fixation on unfalsifiable philosophical interpretation.
That just makes it incomprehensible to outsiders when they quibble over the metaphors used to explain the equations that are used to guess what may happen experimentally. (Rather than admitting that any definition is an abstraction and any analogies or metaphors are merely pedagogical tools.)
My kneejerk reaction: Give me the equations. If they are too complicated give me a computer simulation that runs the equations. Now tell me what your experiment is and show me how to plug the numbers so that I may validate the theory.
If I wanted to have people wage war over my mind concerning what I should believe without evidence, I would turn back to religion rather than science.
Anyway, I hope this situation improves in the future. Maybe some virtual particle will appear that better mediates this field (physics).
Having studied undergraduate physics, I think this viewpoint is inverted from the realities of the matter. It is less that the math is complicated and more so these are the relevant tools invented for us to model the experimental results we obtain post discovery/formalization of SR/GR/Quantum experiences. There are computers that can run these simulations but they are infeasible to model large scale processes. That is the reason people are looking for more than numerical solutions to problems, but laws and tools that can simplify modeling large scale emergent behavior that it would be infeasible or unnecessarily complicated to do with numerical simulation. These tools are the more straightforward approach
I agree this doesn't gel well with the pop-science approach.
However, it is actually a similar approach to how De Broglie, Schrodinger, and others originally came up with their equations for quantum behavior - we start with special relativity and consider how a wave _must_ behave if its properties are going to be frame-independent, and follow the math from there. That part is equation (*), and the article leads with a bit of an analogy of how we might build a fully classical implemenation of it in an experiment (strings, possibly attached to a stiff rubber sheet) so we get some everyday intuition into the equation's behavior. So from my point of view, I found it very interesting.
(What the article doesn't really get into is why certain fields might have S=0 and others not, what the intuition for the cause of that is, etc. It also presupposes you have bought into quantum field theory in the first place, and wish to consider the fundamental "wavicles" that would emerge from certain field equations, and that you aren't looking closely at the EM force or spin or any other number of things normally encountered before learning about the weak force).
I had very much the same feeling. Honestly this might be all true, but it's got a vibe I don't like. I did QFT in my PhD and have read plenty of good and bad science exposition, and it doesn't feel right.
I can't point at any outright mistakes, but for example I think the dismissal of the common interpretation of virtual particles in Feynman diagrams is not persuasive. If you think the prevailing view among experts is wrong then the burden of proof is high, perhaps right than you can reach in am article pitched so low, but I don't feel like reading his book.
> introducing a lot of new ideas without grounding
The grounding is 3 years of advanced math.
> This just...gives no sense at all as to what this stiffness parameter actually is, why it turned up, or why there's what feels like a very coincidental overlap with the Uncertainty principle
Because not everyone has the prerequisite math or time/attention to go into quantum field theory for a rather intuitive point about mass and fields.
This reminds me a bit of how high school physics classes are sometimes taught when it comes to thermodynamics and optics. You learn these "formulas" and properties (like harmonics or ideal gas law) because deriving where they come from require 2-3 years of actual undergraduate physics with additional lessons in differential equations and analysis.
This particular article has a prelude on the same website
https://profmattstrassler.com/2025/01/10/no-the-short-range-...
"For the subtleties of different meanings of “mass”, see chapters 5-8 of my book.]"
Isn't this called "equivocation" in logic?
How I learned it, as a mere undergrad, was that the mass of the virtual particle for the field in question determined exactly how long it could exist, just by the uncertainty principle -- much like the way the virtual particles drive Hawking radiation.
In short, a massive virtual particle can exist only briefly before The Accountant comes looking to balance the books. And if you give it a speed of c, it can travel only so far during its brief existence before the books get balanced. And therefore the range of the force is determined by the mass of the force carrier virtual particle.
There's probably some secondary and tertiary "loops" as the virtual particle possibly decays during its brief existence, influencing the math a little further, but that is beyond me.
And the article we are discussing explains why this is incorrect.
PSA: it's "fib," not "phib"
No, his use is intentional. It's a portmanteau for "physics fib".
There is an interesting video essay by the Huygens Optics channel where some simulations of these field effects are considered.
Turning Waves Into Particles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMP5Pbx8I4s
And if unfamiliar, that channel constantly delivers high quality thought provoking content on the nature of light.
One thing I'm not clear on when watching his videos is whether what he's describing is an established scientific interpretation, or his own thoughts as someone who has extensive knowledge on optical engineering (vs theory).
Very enjoyable and thought provoking stuff though!
Edit: spelling
When he provides sources, then it's the first one, otherwise the second.
That's great. Thanks. When you start watching it you think, it will be too long, but it gets better and better. Everything goes back to Einstein. YARH! Yet another rabbit hole! It's amazing we have any time left to do anything after reading HN.