- #1
Paulibus
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The Higgs mechanism and the Beginning of the Universe
Now that the excitement about the discovery of the Higgs particle has made the Higgs
mechanism justly famous, could someone please clarify for me the implications of
incorporating this component of the Standard Model of Particle Physics into the Standard
Model of Cosmology?
As (hopefully) I understand it, the Higgs mechanism is thought to be instrumental in assigning mass to stuff, firstly to matter made of Fermions, which do have a rest-mass (mass measured at rest relative to an inertial observer) and secondly to Bosons, that don’t have a rest mass and are therefore, according to special relativity that rules locally, always traveling at light-speed, c. But Bosons do carry energy and so acquire relativistic mass, which has inertia, gravitates and qua mass, must also be assigned by the Higgs mechanism. Is this correct?
I also understand that the Higgs mechanism is thought to have first switched on suddenly, as it were, in the cooling and expanding very-early-indeed universe, when a phase-change was caused by the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a specific potential. Before this instant, in what I’d like to call the dawn universe, mass had not yet emerged into existence as something that could be measured, even in principle by imaginary inertial observers. Indeed, in such a dawn universe the presumably entirely inertia- and mass-less (but today massive) particles/waves that comprise the material universe, namely Fermions and Bosons, must then have all been (locally) traveling at c. It seems to me that the time dilation of special relativity tells us that time itself, as we know it, must then have been on hold, as it were, and that it could not then have existed as a locally measurable parameter for local physics, even in principle.
If all this is not mistaken perhaps Eternal Dawn would be a more appropriate description of
the Beginning than Big Bang.
Now that the excitement about the discovery of the Higgs particle has made the Higgs
mechanism justly famous, could someone please clarify for me the implications of
incorporating this component of the Standard Model of Particle Physics into the Standard
Model of Cosmology?
As (hopefully) I understand it, the Higgs mechanism is thought to be instrumental in assigning mass to stuff, firstly to matter made of Fermions, which do have a rest-mass (mass measured at rest relative to an inertial observer) and secondly to Bosons, that don’t have a rest mass and are therefore, according to special relativity that rules locally, always traveling at light-speed, c. But Bosons do carry energy and so acquire relativistic mass, which has inertia, gravitates and qua mass, must also be assigned by the Higgs mechanism. Is this correct?
I also understand that the Higgs mechanism is thought to have first switched on suddenly, as it were, in the cooling and expanding very-early-indeed universe, when a phase-change was caused by the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a specific potential. Before this instant, in what I’d like to call the dawn universe, mass had not yet emerged into existence as something that could be measured, even in principle by imaginary inertial observers. Indeed, in such a dawn universe the presumably entirely inertia- and mass-less (but today massive) particles/waves that comprise the material universe, namely Fermions and Bosons, must then have all been (locally) traveling at c. It seems to me that the time dilation of special relativity tells us that time itself, as we know it, must then have been on hold, as it were, and that it could not then have existed as a locally measurable parameter for local physics, even in principle.
If all this is not mistaken perhaps Eternal Dawn would be a more appropriate description of
the Beginning than Big Bang.
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