how do fields interact with objects? i'm used to the idea that matter collision causes a force to be exerted, but how do fields and particles interact? i read about gauge bosons, but i can't picture it physically making sense. i mean if you propogate a pac

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06/13/15 (Sat) 05:01:34 No.2571

how do fields interact with objects? i'm used to the idea that matter collision causes a force to be exerted, but how do fields and particles interact? i read about gauge bosons, but i can't picture it physically making sense. i mean if you propogate a packet to another particle so that it "knows" to feel a force, how does that magically produce the force, and how can the fields know where the particles are in relation to each other?

also, does gravity do this? i mean we know that particles have mass, but is the field being spacetime render the need for a mediator useless? i'm confused so hard about this. can all collision dynamics be reduced to being gauge bosons interacting with field excitations? like my hand and the bond energy being the electromagnetic interaction, striking a surface with inertia that's produce by the particles and their mass increasing momentum, but is this merely the sum of the messenger particles being absorbed/emitted on the quantum level by my atomic nuclei and the surface's nuclei? the bonds reverberating the collision are the electrons being excited from their valence shells slightly? or am i wrong thinking of it like this?

06/14/15 (Sun) 05:01:05 No.2585

i sort of read up on this again, but i'm still stuck. it seems like the higgs field and boson are meant to explain why the mass parameter exists, but it does not explain the attractive forces of gravitation, as it is still described by general relativity, but has no mediator particle. we measure the strength of the field by the mass, but can that imply that the higgs field and the warping of minkowski spacetime have some form of relation if the two are correct? i'm sorry if i'm wrong here.

06/14/15 (Sun) 10:24:52 No.2587

It's better to treat particles as fields/wavepackets and give up trying to use points. Study some undergrad QM: understand that to get from position to momentum and vice versa you basically Fourier transform, do the math yourself for simple Gaussian packets, read up on Hilbert spaces, learn about Fock spaces (personally I thought it was too obvious to be true, but it's literally the span of the spaces of states with 0, 1, 2, … particles), and so-called second quantization. Then you will be able to understand the questions you have (either the answers, or why they are meaningless).

06/23/15 (Tue) 23:57:55 No.2636

neat

07/14/15 (Tue) 17:55:03 No.2783

>>2585

I don't think there's any direct proof that inertial mass = gravitational mass yet. But so far we haven't found any discrepancy between them. So yeah your question does make sense.

But, as far as I'm aware, the proposition that it's impossible to tell difference between uniform acceleration and uniform gravity field (equivalent to the statement that inertial and gravitational mass are equivalent) is also one of the core propositions of general relativity.

Anyway, the biggest problem of origin of mass through Higgs field is that the Higgs boson will interact with vacuum, forming particles that further interact with Higgs field, so without some renormalisation (with supersymmetry, for example) the mass diverges to infinity. Or it should at least be on order of Planck mass, which is way more than the observed.

>>2587

It's either this (which is mathematically simpler to understand, but it won't help you how to imagine it), or to imagine virtual particles which should generally not be there. You can imagine the vacuum as a soup of short-lived virtual particles that can interact with matter, but since they're virtual, their lifetime exponentially decreases with their energy. So when a particle moves through empty space, it will bump into and interact with non-existent Higgs bosons, which are the only particles that actually do have mass (because their mass is directly defined my Higgs field vacuum value, presumed to be constant). It's essentially a scalar field (directionless) that slows down particles that move through it, like a viscous fluid slows down a falling rock.