Demystifying the Higgs Boson with Leonard Susskind
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN repeatedly recommends it as an approachable, math-light route to understanding mass and the Higgs field.
Recommended by 3 people across 5 different months, 2016 to 2024.
Why Physics Stack Exchange recommends it
Physics Stack Exchange users link it as an accessible, detailed walkthrough of the Higgs mechanism, and often cite specific timestamps when asking or answering follow-up questions about mass, the Z boson and field space.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2013 to 2020.
What it is
Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind explains what the Higgs mechanism is and what it means to give mass to particles. He also covers what is at stake for physics and cosmology.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Higgs boson.
What people said
Strong rec bitkrieg · 2016-08 · Hacker News · on “There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)”
If anyone is interested in the mechanics of the higgs field / basic quantum mechanics in general, I found this lecture to be an excellent explanation: [this video]
Strong rec simiones · 2022-07 · Hacker News · on “Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles”
The mass of the massive gauge bosons, the W and Z bosons. Edit: there is an excellent in-depth (but math-light) explanation about the Higgs mechanism by Leonard Susskind. I highly recommend it if you are interested, it lasts about 1h (plus some Q&A) and is extremely approachable, while being presented by an established authority in the field. [this video]
Strong rec tsimionescu · 2022-10 · Hacker News · on “Inside the Proton”
If you're interested in the Higgs mechanism as a layman, I highly highly recommend this talk by Leonard Susskind: [this video] It's about 1 hour long (plus some questions) and it goes through some basic ideas of what it means for something to have mass and all the way to the Higgs mechanism.
Strong rec tsimionescu · 2024-09 · Hacker News · on “How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles”
If anyone wants to dig deeper, there is an excellent lecture on YouTube by Leonard Susskind. This goes into some details on how fields in general give mass to (composite) particles, and how the Higgs field has certain properties that allow it to give mass to elementary particles. It goes only into a tiny bit of math, absolutely intelligible at the high-school or at least undergraduate level. [this video]
Recommends Eduardo Guerras Valera · 2013-03 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “How does the Higgs mechanism work?”
See also this popular description [this video] by L. Susskind, or this other [LINK] by 't Hooft including pictures of the LHC and some nice diagrams.
Recommends Larry Harson · 2013-10 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “Nobel Prize 2013: What is it about?”
Have a look at Prof Susskind's video, Demystifying the Higgs Boson [this video] . There are other videos in mechanics, relativity etc as part of the course.
Recommends simiones · 2022-04 · Hacker News · on “It took me 10 years to understand entropy”
> no one really knows what mass is. We only know that mass bends space-time curve, hence gravity. Mass is much better understood by its role in inertia. Basically mass is the amount of energy you need to exchange with a thing to change its current speed. This observation works from Newtonian mechanics to QM and GR as well. Now, why do things have mass? The famous E=mc² explains this for most things: they have mass because something inside them has potential or kinetic energy. This works all the way down to the atomic level - the mass of a proton for example is almost entirely explained by the potential energy of the quarks being held together in a small volume; the total mass of the quarks t
Recommends tsimionescu · 2022-10 · Hacker News · on “Inside the Proton”
The quarks that are bound in a way we call a proton are held together by the strong force at a certain distance from each other - that distance is what we consider the volume of the proton, with the quarks being "inside that volume". This system of 3 quarks has some amount of potential energy, and/or some amount of kinetic energy from the relative movement of the 3 quarks. The mass of this system is then given essentially by E=mc^2, with E being this kinetic energy. There is a very good video of a lecture by Leonard Susskind that explains why energy and mass are interchangeable in this way if you want a more in-depth explanation: [this video]
Cites suissidle · 2013-09 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “What's the relationship between weakly hypercharged bosons and Higgs bosons?”
In this video [this video] , Leonard Susskind does a good job trying to explain succinctly the Higgs field and exactly how it gives elementary fermions mass, except for one point he seems to skip a few things. The weak hypercharge is endearingly called 'zilch' ( 0:46:00 ). He goes on to explain how (e.g.) an accelerating electron (or other zilch-charged particle) can emit a $Z$ boson. He then postulates ( 0:48:16 ) the existence of a field (none other than a 'ziggs boson condensate'), which (in a similar manner to a uniform electric field giving electric dipoles a potential energy - and therefore an extra mass - that depends on their orientation) gives fermions mass by the Dirac mechanism (explai
Cites Zeynel · 2013-11 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “Do the particles made in a collider exist outside the collider?”
Below is the transcript of a section from Demystifying the Higgs Boson [this video] with Leonard Susskind. Around 1:02:23 Susskind says that the heaviest of the fermions is called the top quark. Top quark is thousands of times heavier than the electron many many times heavier, and higgs preferentially will decay into top quarks. (higgs cannot decay to quarks because they are too heavy. so you take two quarks and align them to produce higgs! ... Go into the laboratory and take two top quarks, collide them together and make a higgs. The problem is that it is not so easy to find top quarks in nature... why not? they decay very rapidly to the other quarks. They are not sitting around. You cannot put